Concerns raised by Donald Trump's remarks about 'clearing Gaza'

Share and Follow

US President Donald Trump’s proposal to “just clean out” Gaza by uprooting Palestinians to neighbouring Arab countries has been rejected by Palestinians, Jordan and Egypt, with some experts saying it is “not a serious” idea and others arguing it could amount to ethnic cleansing.

and saying the displacement of Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan could be done “temporarily or could be long term”.

“So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” he said.

“You’re talking about probably a million-and-a-half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.'”

Trump said he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah about the issue and expected to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Both have rebuffed Trump’s suggestion.

“Our stance that is the path to achieving peace is firm and unwavering. Our rejection of displacement is also firm and unwavering,” Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi said.

Egypt’s foreign ministry said it categorically rejected any displacement of Palestinians from their land, be it “short term or long term”. Israel has occupied Palestinian territories — the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) — since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, after which it started building settlements.

In 2005, Israel ended its permanent military presence in Gaza, withdrawing its troops and dismantling its settlements there.

But the enclave has remained under a land, air and sea blockade by Israel since 2007, and Israel is still considered to be the occupying power under international law.

The UN considers both Gaza and the West Bank to still be under Israeli occupation, which Israel rejects.

Jordan, Egypt and other Arab nations have long rejected the idea of Palestinians in Gaza being moved to their countries.

Like Palestinians, Arab countries fear any mass movement across the border would further undermine prospects for a “two-state solution” — the idea of creating a state of Palestine next to Israel — and leave Arab nations dealing with the consequences.

Jordan is already home to several million Palestinians, while tens of thousands live in Egypt.

Many Palestinians in Gaza have said they would not leave, even if they could, because they fear it might lead to another permanent displacement in a repeat of 1948, and what they call the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, when 700,000 of them were dispossessed from their homes during the war that surrounded the creation of Israel.

On Sunday, some rejected Trump’s suggestion.

“If he thinks he will forcibly displace the Palestinian people, this is impossible. The Palestinian people firmly believe that this land is theirs, this soil is their soil,” displaced Palestinian Magdy Seidam told Reuters.

Another displaced resident, Allamuldin Deeb, said: “These futile attempts will not weaken the resolve of the Palestinian people nor drive us away from our Palestinian land.”

Hassan Jabareen, the director of Palestinian rights group Adalah, told The Guardian: “To ‘clean’ Gaza immediately after the war would in fact be a continuation of the war, through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”

Gaza is land that Palestinians would want as part of a future Palestinian state.

Last year, Israel’s then-foreign minister Israel Katz, now serving as defence minister, said Israel had no plans to deport Palestinians from Gaza. He said Israel would coordinate with Egypt on Palestinian refugees and find a way not to harm Egypt’s interests.

However, comments by some in the Israeli government have stoked Palestinian and Arab fears of a new Nakba.

Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said Trump’s plan would give Palestinians “the opportunity to build new and better lives elsewhere”.

“With God’s help, I will work with the prime minister and cabinet to develop an operational plan to implement this as soon as possible,” he said.

Analysis of damage in Gaza Strip using Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University.

Rami Khouri, a fellow at the American University of Beirut, said Trump’s comments were “not a serious policy change”.

“The troubling thing is what it reflects in terms of how easily and quickly the most powerful man in the world can throw out an idea like this … which look at the Palestinians as pieces on a monopoly game board: disposable people, movable people, mobile people, people who have no anchorage, no rights, no agency,” he told ABC News.

Khouri said Egypt and Jordan were in a “difficult situation” because they rely heavily on the United States for military and economic aid.

“They have to be super careful how they turn down this suggestion and come up with a better one,” he said.

“They are saying the best thing to do with these people is to let them live a decent life inside Palestine peacefully next to the Israelis and here are the blueprints for that which have been presented by the Arabs and Palestinians and Hamas many, many times in the last 30 or 40 years.”

A group of women and men huddled in blankets.

Displaced Palestinians gather with their belongings near a roadblock as they wait to return to their homes in the northern part of Gaza. Source: AP / Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

Joost Hiltermann, Middle East and North Africa program director at the International Crisis Group, said: “The Egyptians and Jordanians … would be existentially threatened by an influx of 2.3 million Gazans into their own societies.”

US President Donald Trump has described Gaza as a “demolition site”, saying he had spoken to Jordan’s king about the issue. Source: AP / Jehad Alshrafi/AP

HA Hellyer, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, said the plan would get little support from Arab populations, who would be outraged by the idea.

“Because the historical record is very clear; every time Palestinians have been forced to leave part of Palestine, they never went back,” Hellyer told The Financial Times.

“Emptying Gaza of its inhabitants would not have any support from the Arabs or even internationally, because it is the definition of ethnic cleansing.”

Jordanian writer and political analyst Adel Mahmoud called Trump’s idea “unrealistic” and a reflection of “the position of the Israeli far right” made under “a humanitarian pretext”.

“Jordan and Egypt will not accept it,” he told AFP.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse