United States President Donald Trump says he would like to “just clean out” Gaza, urging Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians from the coastal enclave.
Speaking with reporters on board Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he had a call earlier in the day with King Abdullah II of Jordan and would speak with Egypt President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi later on Sunday.
Trump said he complimented Jordan for having successfully accepted Palestinian refugees and that he told the king, “I would love for you to take on more, ‘cause I am looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza displaced almost the entire 2.3 million people in Gaza, some of them multiple times. Trump said Gaza’s inhabitants could be moved “temporarily or could be long term”.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) condemned the US president’s suggestion, calling it an encouragement of “war crimes”.
Describing Trump’s idea as “deplorable”, the group, which has fought a war with Israel alongside Hamas until last week’s ceasefire, said his “proposal falls within the framework of encouraging war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land”.
It also said Trump’s statement was “in line with the worst of the agenda of the extreme Zionist right and a continuation of the policy of denying the existence of the Palestinian people, their will and their rights” and called on Egypt and Jordan to reject his plan.
Abdullah Al-Arian, associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that the US president’s remarks “should be taken seriously in part because we have seen this specific demand being made for over the last year and a half”.
He said the Israeli officials had indicated “very early on in the course of the war” to “ethnically cleanse” as much of the Palestinian territory as possible.
Al-Arian said Palestinians themselves would not be interested in such a proposal by Trump. “They know all too well what it means to leave their home and what the status of Palestinian refugees has looked like for the past 70 years,” he said.
Meanwhile, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed Trump’s idea to relocate Gaza’s residents to Egypt and Jordan.
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what they call the “Nakba” or catastrophe – the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, which el-Sisi said could jeopardise the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.
Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.
Israel’s 15-month war on the Palestinian enclave killed more than 47,000 people, though residents and activists say the actual toll could be much higher. The relentless bombing has also left much of the territory in ruins, with the United Nations estimating the reconstruction will take many years.
However, Trump also said he has ended his predecessor’s hold on sending 2,000-pound (907kg) bombs to Israel. “We released them today,” Trump said of the bombs. “They’ve been waiting for them for a long time.”
Asked why he lifted the ban on those bombs, Trump responded, “Because they bought them.”
Then-President Joe Biden had put a hold on the delivery of those bombs due to concerns over the effect they could have on the civilian population.
A 2,000-pound bomb has a destruction radius of 35 metres (115 feet), according to the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA).
The US has historically supplied substantial foreign aid to Israel; a total of $297bn (adjusted for inflation) between 1946 and 2023, $216bn of which was in military aid and $81bn in economic aid, according to data from the US Agency for International Aid (USAID).
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since its founding.
A ceasefire in Gaza went into effect a week ago and has led to the release of some Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
