“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.

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

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

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

“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.

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

“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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

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

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse