Palestine and militant group Hamas on Sunday slammed US President Donald Trump’s proposition of moving out enough of the population to “just clean out” the war-torn area to create a virtual clean slate.
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas opposed the proposed project and said that Palestinian people “will not abandon their land and holy sites”
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told news agency AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects”, as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades”.
This comes a day after Trump said that he has discussed the possibility of relocating over one million Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring nations with King Abdullah II of Jordan.
“I said to him that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess,” Trump said.
Trump expressed interest in both Jordan and Egypt accommodating displaced people from the war-torn region. He mentioned plans to discuss this matter also with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
“You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said, adding that there have been centuries-long conflicts in the region.
“I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land”.
“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing”, the league said in a statement.
Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry also said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights”.