AFPUS President Donald Trump has said the two million Palestinians who would be resettled in neighbouring countries under his plan to take over and rebuild the Gaza Strip would have no right of return.
“No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing,” he told Fox News. “I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.”
A clip of the interview was released a day after Trump said he was “committed to buying and owning Gaza”, despite global condemnation of the plan he unveiled last week.
The Palestinian Authority and the armed group Hamas, whose 16-month war with Israel has caused widespread devastation in Gaza, reiterated that Palestinian land was “not for sale”.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump’s proposal as “revolutionary and creative”.
The UN has warned that any forced displacement of civilians from occupied territory is strictly prohibited under international law and “tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.
It comes three weeks into a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, during which Hamas has released some of the Israeli hostages it is holding in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.
More than 48,200 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times, almost 70% of buildings are estimated to be damaged or destroyed, the healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed, and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.
In his interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump promised to build “beautiful communities” for the Palestinians of Gaza.
“Could be five, six, could be two. But we’ll build safe communities, a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is. In the meantime, I would own this,” he said.
“Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. No big money spent.”
He then explained that the Palestinians would have no right of return to Gaza because their lives would be “much better” elsewhere, contradicting Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told reporters last week that the relocations would be temporary during reconstruction.
“If they have to return now, it’ll be years before you could ever – it’s not habitable,” Trump said.
“I’m talking about starting to build, and I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt. You know, we give them billions and billions of dollars a year.”
Egypt and Jordan’s leaders have rejected both Trump’s plan and his previous requests to take in refugees from Gaza.
However, Jordan’s King Abdullah is due to meet Trump in Washington on Tuesday, while Israel’s president said Trump would also hold talks with Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the coming days.
On Sunday, Trump doubled down on his takeover plan.
“I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza,” he told reporters on board Air Force One, without explaining who he would buy the territory from and how the US would own it.
“As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back.”
Trump said people from all over the world would be able to move to Gaza and that Palestinians would not want to go back there.
“They only go back because they have no alternative,” he claimed.
ReutersIsrael’s prime minister praised Trump’s proposal at a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday.
“For a full year, we have been told that on the ‘day after’, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation], the Palestinian Authority, needs to be in the Strip,” Netanyahu said.
“President Trump came with a completely different vision, much better for the State of Israel, a revolutionary and creative vision, which we are discussing. He is very determined to carry it out. This also opens many possibilities before us.”
The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry said: “The rights of our people and our land are not for sale, exchange or bargaining.”
“The Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu are trying to cover up the crimes of genocide, forced displacement and annexation which they have committed against our people,” it added.
“For this purpose, they continue to promote slogans and positions which are separate from the political reality and far from the requirements of the political solutions to the conflict.”
A political official from Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the UK and other countries – said Trump’s remarks were “absurd” and reflected “deep ignorance of Palestine and the region”.
“Gaza is not a property to be sold and bought. It is an integral part of our occupied Palestinian land,” Izzat al-Rishq stated.
Palestinians fear a repeat of the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, when hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants make up three quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war along with Gaza, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.
Palestinians insist on the right of those refugees to return but Israel has refused this.
Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it retained control of its shared border, airspace and shoreline, giving it effective control of the movement of people and goods. The UN still regards Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory because of the level of control Israel has.
AFPGermany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz also strongly criticised Trump’s plan on Sunday, calling it a “scandal”.
“I say this with the Egyptian government, with the Jordanian government and with the people who can count on human dignity: the relocation of a population is unacceptable and against international law,” he said during a televised pre-election debate.
Palestinian officials and Arab states also condemned comments made by Netanyahu in a TV interview last week.
An Israeli journalist was discussing efforts to normalise diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia when he mistakenly said there would be no progress without the creation of a “Saudi state”.
“A Palestinian state.” Netanyahu corrected him, before adding: “Unless you want the Palestinian state to be in Saudi Arabia? They have a lot of territory.”
Egypt called the suggestion “reckless” and something that “directly infringes upon Saudi sovereignty”, while Jordan said it was “a flagrant violation of international law”.
Saudi Arabia said on Sunday that it appreciated the “condemnation, disapproval and total rejection announced by the brotherly countries towards what Benjamin Netanyahu stated regarding the displacement of the Palestinian people from their land”.
