Trump says to ‘clean out’ Gaza, urges Arab countries to take more refugees

Trump says to ‘clean out’ Gaza, 

Urges Arab countries to take more refugees

President Donald Trump said he wanted Jordan and Egypt to take in more Palestinians from Gaza so they could “maybe live in peace” there.

The Washington Post January 26, 2025  By Annabelle Timsit and Gerry Shih

President Donald Trump said he wants Jordan and Egypt to take in more Palestinian refugees as part of a plan to “clean out” Gaza, a controversial proposal previously advocated by voices on Israel’s right wing and among its military hard-liners.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he spoke with King Abdullah II of Jordan — whose country has historically taken in millions of Palestinian refugees — about the idea, which Abdullah and other Arab leaders have previously rejected.

“I said to him, I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess,” Trump said. “I’d like him to take people. I’d like Egypt to take people.”

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” he said.

“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace,” he added. When asked, he said this solution could be temporary “or it could be long term.”

It is not clear if Trump’s comments signal a change in U.S. policy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Sunday. The official readouts of the call from Jordan’s royal palace and the White House did not mention the suggestion of relocating Palestinians.

Human rights groups and the Biden administration have opposed a forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza or the occupied West Bank. Israel’s Arab neighbors also oppose it and have said they fear that Israel intends to force Palestinians out in order to weaken their case for independent Palestinian statehood. After Hamas attacked on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a counterattack that has forced nearly 2 million Gazans from their homes and left much of the Gaza Strip in ruins, drawing accusations from critics that Israel was seeking the deliberate removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

The idea has support among ultranationalists in Israel, who seek to establish settlements in the enclave. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said in 2023 that “the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world” was “the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region.” Itamar Ben Gvir, another far-right politician who recently resigned from Israel’s government over its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, previously said Palestinians should be encouraged to “voluntarily migrate.”

Even before war erupted in 2023, some Israeli strategists proposed encouraging Gazans to move to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt possibly in exchange for Palestinian statehood. The idea has been discussed by Palestinian, Israeli and Arab leaders for years but has remained highly controversial, given the repeated history of forced Palestinian displacement over the past 75 years. An estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled in the war of 1948 that led to the creation of the Jewish state — an event known as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic. Another conflict in 1967 displaced hundreds of thousands more.

Trump’s comments drew immediate criticism from Hamas and Arab governments. In a statement, Hamas accused the Trump administration of falling in line with Israeli plans and urged Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries “to emphasize their firm stances in rejecting any proposal of displacement or deportation” of Palestinians.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry in a statement Sunday reiterated its “unwavering support” for the Palestinian people and their rights to land, in accordance with international law. It strongly condemned actions that undermine these rights, including displacement and settlement expansion.

The country’s ambassador to Washington, Motaz Zahran, also previously rejected the idea in an op-ed in the Hill newspaper in October 2023. “Egypt’s stance is clear: it cannot be part of any solution that involves the transfer of Palestinians into Sinai,” Zahran wrote. “Such a move would trigger a second Nakba, an unimaginable tragedy for a resilient people who have an unbreakable bond with their ancestral land.”

The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, also rebuffed Trump’s proposal. “Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change," he said. “Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Weeks after the war began, former Israeli officials and allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including former deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, publicly floated the idea of temporarily relocating Gazans to tent cities in the northern Sinai Peninsula — a proposal that was criticized as being akin to ethnic cleansing of the Strip. A planning document written days after the Hamas attack by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, which was leaked and published by the Israeli website Local Call, also promoted the option of evacuating Gazan civilians to Sinai.

Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military officer who has long argued for encouraging Gazans to settle in Sinai, said the plan was mulled by Arab leaders long before the 2023 war broke out. Mahmoud Abbas, who leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has claimed on several occasions since 2014 that he rejected an offer from Egyptian leaders to settle Palestinians in the northern Sinai adjacent to the Gaza Strip and create a Palestinian state.

“We were pushing this idea years ago, and now it seems to have caught up,” Avivi said, referring to Trump vocalizing the resettlement proposal. “Gaza is ruined and ruled by a very harsh terror organization and many Gazans want to emigrate, so calling for Egypt to open the border is the most basic human thing.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian lawyer who has served as an adviser to Palestinian negotiating teams, said Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi will not want to be seen as giving “exactly what Israel wants: It wants Palestinian land, just not the Palestinians on it.”

“There’s nothing new in all of this,” Buttu said. “To just erase Gaza and build it with something new is to treat [Palestinians] as something replaceable, and the harm that Israel has done as somehow erasable.”

The idea is particularly sensitive because of Palestinians’ recent memory of displacement, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Chatham House think tank.

Many Palestinians fled 20th-century conflicts with Israel to nearby Arab countries, and today, there are an estimated 438,000 U.N.-registered Palestinian refugees in Syria, 493,000 in Lebanon and about 2.4 million in Jordan, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA.

After the start of the war in 2023, Palestinian authorities told The Washington Post in June that about 115,000 Gazans had crossed into Egypt since the previous October and were mostly living in limbo, with no legal status and nowhere else to go.

The question of large-scale displacement of Palestinians to neighboring countries is a “fundamental red line” for Arab countries, particularly Jordan and Egypt, Vakil said. Trump’s suggestion “really challenges and questions whether the U.S. can be a broker and supporter of Palestinian statehood,” she said.

In their call Saturday, Trump told Abdullah that the situation in Gaza was untenable.

“Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

Trump has broadly called for an end to the war in Gaza but has not been explicit about a path to achieve it. Privately, he has offered support for Netanyahu and his country’s offensives against Hamas and Hezbollah — telling the prime minister in a call in October to “do what you have to do,” as The Post reported at the time.

On Saturday, Trump said he overturned former president Joe Biden’s pause on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which was announced in May as part of an effort to reduce the civilian toll from Israel’s military operations.

When asked why he released the bomb shipments to Israel, Trump said: “Because they bought them.”

Niha Masih contributed to this report.