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President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that Palestinians who’ve been displaced from Gaza during the war that began after the October 7 terror attacks on Israel should be relocated to a more habitable location in Egypt or Jordan because of the devastation wrought by more than a year of Israeli bombing.
Speaking in the Oval Office as he signed executive orders and other documents just hours before he was set to host Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on an official visit to the White House, Trump suggested Palestinians should somehow be given a new place to live.
“I feel very differently about Gaza than a lot of people. 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,” said Trump, who called the Gaza Strip “a demolition site” unfit for habitation.
He added: “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area … I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death.”
Trump told reporters that the hypothetical Palestinian relocation could be in Egypt or Jordan – two countries that have repeatedly rejected the idea of hosting more Palestinian refugees – or “other places” that “could be very beautiful and safe and nice”.
Currently, more than 2.1 million people live in the 141 square miles that make up the Gaza Strip, making the Hamas-controlled territory one of the world’s densest population centers.
Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, both Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank were meant to comprise parts of a future Palestinian state that was long the end goal of a US-led peace process that has been stalled for decades.
Forcibly displacing Gaza residents who’ve already had to relocate from their homes within the territory could be considered ethnic cleansing under international law, but Trump told reporters he thinks Palestinians who currently reside there would “love to leave Gaza if they had an option”.
“Right now, they don’t have an option. What are they going to do? They have to go back to Gaza,” he said.
Standing alongside Netanyahu several hours later, Trump doubled down on his comments by suggesting that Palestinians would “much rather not go back to Gaza and live in a beautiful alternative that’s safe” and said he didn’t think Palestinians should return there because Gaza “has been very unlucky for them”.
“They’ve lived like hell. They lived like you’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative,” he said.
He added that he does not believe the Jordanian or Egyptian governments would refuse his requests for them to house the 2.1 million Gaza residents because he’s not Joe Biden.
“I don’t think they’re going to tell me ‘No.’ I think they’re going to tell Biden ‘No,’ and I think they’re going to tell other people ‘No’,” he said.
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