US President Donald Trump told journalists yesterday that he would like Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries to increase the number of Palestinian refugees they accept from the Gaza Strip, potentially taking out enough of the population to "cleanse" the war-torn area. His statement was rejected by Egypt and Jordan and welcomed by the far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. This is also one of the leading topics in the Western press today.
US President Trump's proposal has raised new questions about US policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writes the American newspaper "New York Times". Trump appears to be echoing the Israeli far-right's desire to encourage Palestinians to leave the enclave, the paper notes. The idea, which appeals to Palestinians' fundamental fear of being driven from their homeland, has been rejected by Egypt and Jordan.
Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Palestinians also live in other Arab countries, such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, as well as around the world, the paper notes. However, the Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected the idea of further displacement outside the Palestinian territories, pointing out that forcing the Palestinians to leave their lands would erase any hope for a future Palestinian state, notes the "New York Times".
Egypt and Jordan are major US partners in the region, and there is a continuity among various US administrations in the understanding that the stability of these two countries is crucial for the stability of the entire Middle East. Both countries receive significant funding from the US, with Egypt being the second largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel, the American newspaper emphasizes.
The publication also dwells on the detail that on Friday the Trump administration issued a memorandum to immediately freeze all foreign aid for a 90-day period. However, the document had two main exceptions - Israel and Egypt. On the same day, the White House instructed the Pentagon to continue supplying Israel with two-ton bombs. Deliveries of this type of weapon were abruptly suspended last summer by Joe Biden to prevent the possible destruction of a significant part of the Palestinian city of Rafah - on the border with Egypt. Israeli forces nevertheless bombed the city, the American newspaper recalls.
Since the beginning of the war in October 2023, Amman and Cairo have repeatedly ruled out the possibility of any transfer of Palestinians to Jordanian and Egyptian territory, stating that this would mean "liquidating the Palestinian cause" at the expense of Israel's neighbors, writes the British newspaper "Financial Times". Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has warned that accepting Gaza residents would endanger Egypt's peace agreement with Israel due to the risk that Palestinian militants will begin to attack Israel from Egyptian territory.
British analyst H. A. Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank the Center for American Progress, told the Financial Times that resettling Palestinian refugees “could be deeply destabilizing.” Both countries have weak economies and need US support, but their leaders would not want to be complicit in what the Arab world sees as a second “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to neighboring countries in 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, Hellyer noted.
The British analyst added that such a move would undermine prospects for normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which has long been a focus of US diplomatic efforts in the region. "This would make the deal even more unlikely in the near future", is Hellyer's opinion.
The chairman of an organization that lobbied Arab and Muslim Americans to vote for Trump in the last election, yesterday spoke out against the Republican's call to relocate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, the "Times of Israel" newspaper reported. "We categorically reject the president's proposal that Palestinians in Gaza be relocated, apparently by force, to Egypt or Jordan," Bishara Bahbah, chairman of "Arab Americans for Trump", told the Israeli newspaper.
"To "cleanse" Gaza immediately after the war would in fact mean continuing the war by ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people," Hassan Jabarin, head of the Palestinian human rights organization "Adalah," told the British newspaper "Guardian". No proposal to temporarily relocate Palestinians out of Gaza to rebuild the destroyed enclave would inspire serious credibility, given the history of displacement that began in 1948 with the "Nakba." Since the creation of Israel, about 700,000 Palestinians have been expelled from their homelands. At the time, many of them believed they were leaving the country only temporarily and had been holding onto the keys to their homes for decades, hoping to return, Jabarin said.
Omer Schatz, a professor of international law at the Paris Institute of Political Science and an advisor to the International Criminal Court (ICC), described Trump's remarks as "a call for ethnic cleansing." According to Schatz, the US president is echoing calls that extremist Israeli politicians and public figures made at the beginning of the war. "We are witnessing an extremely dangerous but natural continuation of the calls for dehumanization and genocide that we have seen from the most extreme voices in Israel," Schatz said, quoted by the Guardian.
The human rights organization "Council on American-Islamic Relations" (CAIR) said Trump's proposal was "misleading and dangerous nonsense", writes "The Guardian". And CAIR described the US president's statement as a proposal for ethnic cleansing. "The Palestinian people do not want to abandon Gaza, and neighboring countries do not want to help Israel ethnically cleanse the strip," a CAIR statement said, quoted by "The Guardian".