WASHINGTON DC: U.S. President Donald Trump is doubling down on his plan to force Palestinians out of Gaza, as he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday at the White House.
“I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable and make it a home,” Trump told reporters ahead of his meeting with Netanyahu.
Calling Gaza a “demolition site” Trump framed the issue as providing a preferred “alternative” for the inhabitants of war-torn strip.
“Right now, they don’t have an option. What are they going to do? They have to go back to Gaza. But what is Gaza? There’s practically not a building standing,” he said.
In recent days, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the southern parts of Gaza have marched north toward their homes after Israel allowed people to return as part of the ceasefire-for-hostage-release deal with Hamas.
Speaking to reporters at the White House earlier Tuesday, U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff suggested the administration is considering renegotiating parts of the ceasefire deal that took effect on Jan. 19, the day before Trump was inaugurated.
“Part of the problem is that it wasn’t such a wonderful agreement that was first signed. That was not dictated by the Trump administration. We had nothing to do with it,” he said. “Now we’re working within that rubric, and we’re figuring things out.”
He reiterated Trump’s suggestion to remove Palestinians to neighboring Egypt and Jordan, saying the five-year reconstruction plan for Gaza as outlined in Phase 3 is “physically impossible.”
“It is unfair to have explained to Palestinians that they might be back in five years. That’s just preposterous,” Witkoff said in defense of Trump’s plan.
Trump’s insistence on relocating the Palestinians could signal a desire to renegotiate the ceasefire deal, particularly the second phase, said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“The goal might be to force Hamas into choosing between relinquishing control of Gaza or leaving the Strip if it wants an Israeli withdrawal or reconstruction, or risk the entirety of the population facing forcible removal, though how that would be carried out is unknown,” Alkhatib told VOA.
Trump first suggested in January that he wants Jordan and Egypt to take in more displaced Palestinians as part of an effort to “clean out” Gaza.
In response, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League released a joint statement earlier this month rejecting any plans to move Palestinians out of their territories in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
They warned that such plans “threaten the region’s stability, risk expanding the conflict, and undermine prospects for peace and coexistence among its peoples.”
Large numbers of Palestinians were driven from their homes twice in what is now called Israel. In 1967, Israel’s seizure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip drove 300,000 Palestinians mostly into Jordan. In the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, about 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes — an event the Palestinians commemorate as Al-Nakba, Arabic for “the catastrophe.”
(VOA)
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