Trump pushes Jordan, Egypt to take in Palestinians to ‘clean out’ Gaza

A suggestion by President Donald Trump to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians raised new questions Sunday about United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East.

Trump’s comments appeared to echo the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza – an idea that goes to the heart of Palestinian fears that they will be driven from their remaining homelands, and one that is likely to be rejected by Egypt and Jordan.

“You’re talking about probably a million-and-a-half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza on Saturday. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”

Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan, saying, “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’” He said he would also like Egypt to take in more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

He said Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long-term.”

It was unclear from Trump’s comments if he was suggesting that all people in Gaza leave. The enclave has a population of about 2 million.

The suggestion by Trump was rejected Sunday by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.

“The Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured death and destruction over 15 months in one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 21st century, simply to stay on their land and homeland,” said Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, referring to the war that started with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “Therefore, they will not accept any proposals or solutions, even if seemingly well-intentioned under the guise of reconstruction, as proposed by U.S. President Trump.”

But the idea appeared to be welcomed by hard-line Israeli politicians.

Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a statement on the social platform X on Sunday that seemed to refer to Trump’s comments, although he did not mention the U.S. president.

“After 76 years in which most of the population of Gaza was held by force under harsh conditions to maintain the ambition to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of helping them find other places to start a new, good life is a great idea,” he said.

Smotrich has long advocated for helping Gaza residents who want to leave to depart and for the Israeli military to remain in the enclave to help pave the way for eventual Jewish settlement there.

Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while others now live in other Arab countries – including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – and around the world. But Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected any further resettlement outside Palestinian territories, saying that forcing Palestinians to leave would mean erasing any hope of a future Palestinian state. Without land, they say, there is no country.

Virtually all Egyptians and Jordanians fervently support Palestinian aspirations for statehood, making it unlikely that either government would consent to such arrangement.

The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said in a news conference Sunday that Jordan’s “rejection of displacement is fixed and unchangeable,” according to Sky News Arabia, in what appeared to be a reference to Trump’s remarks. He added: “Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

There was no public response to Trump’s suggestion from Egypt on Sunday.

“This would be going against its base completely,” Maged Mandour, an Egyptian political analyst, said of the prospects of Egypt taking in large numbers of Palestinians. “It’s just a nonstarter.”

Egypt also fears that the arrival of large numbers of Palestinians could threaten the country’s security. In particular, Cairo has long been concerned that embittered, impoverished Palestinian refugees, if allowed into Egypt, could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, drawing Israeli retaliation.

Early in the war, Egypt became so concerned about the prospect of any move that would send Gaza residents spilling into its territory that it warned Israel that it was jeopardizing the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.

Jordan is home to many Palestinians and many Jordanians of Palestinian descent. Accepting refugees from Gaza would risk destabilizing a population that has never resolved tensions stemming from the original influx of Palestinians, analysts say.

It is unclear whether Trump’s comment signals a change in U.S. policy toward Palestinians.

Under President Joe Biden and other recent presidents other than Trump, the United States officially supported establishing a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, criticized Israeli extremist attempts at seizing more Palestinian land by building settlements on it, and assured Egypt and Jordan that they would not be forced to take in more Palestinians.

But with Trump’s return to the White House, all assumptions that had undergirded U.S. relationships in the Middle East may now be upended.

Egypt and Jordan are both major U.S. partners in the region, and successive U.S. administrations have regarded their stability as crucial to that of the wider Middle East. They both receive significant U.S. funding, with Egypt the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.

The Trump administration Friday issued a memo suddenly freezing all foreign aid for a 90-day reassessment period, but laid out two major exceptions: weapons support to Israel and Egypt. The same day, in a further sign of Trump’s support for Israel, the White House told the Pentagon to proceed with a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that Biden abruptly stopped last summer to discourage the Israeli military from destroying much of the Gaza city of Rafah. Israeli forces bombed the city anyway.

It is unclear if Trump would try to use the $1.3 billion that Egypt is supposed to receive in annual aid as leverage to try to force it to accept more Palestinian refugees.

The fear of being driven from Gaza runs deep among Palestinians, who reject it as a replay of what they call the Nakba – or “catastrophe” in Arabic – the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the war surrounding Israel’s creation as a state.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are trying to return to their homes as the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel enters a second week. It is only the second pause in fighting between the two since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since then, Israel’s military has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. It has also destroyed thousands of homes and buildings in Gaza and killed many of Hamas’ leaders.

Most of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have had to flee their homes at least once. And although aid in recent days has increased, the humanitarian situation remains dire, with water, food and medicine running low and few working hospitals left.

Noura al-Awad, 29, and her family were some of those who stayed put in their homes in Gaza City for the past 15 months, persisting through airstrikes, a ground invasion and near-famine conditions because they were determined not to cede their land to Israel, she said in a phone interview Sunday.

She vowed to outlast Trump’s plans, too.

“For one year and three months, we were attacked from all sides, we got starved and humiliated, we experienced killing, death and destruction, but we didn’t move south,” she said, adding: “No way” would she leave.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.