President Donald Trump sounded a defiant and confident tone on Thursday after the leaders of Egypt and Jordan stated they would not accept and resettle Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
Earlier in the day, reports said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that the Egyptian government supports “the Palestinian people’s insistence to remain on their land, defending their legitimate rights and respecting international law.” Voice of America reports that Egyptian public opinion is strongly against taking in refugees from the war-torn region.
The ministry also promised to reject “any infringement upon those inalienable rights, whether through settlement activities, annexation of land, or the eviction of the rightful owners through displacement or encouraging the transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land, whether temporarily or permanently.”
President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi recently told a group of military officers that relocating Palestinians to the Sinai would be feasible, but the challenge would be gaining acceptance for such an idea among the Egyptian population, VOA reported.
Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi also rejected Trump’s proposal, saying that “Palestine is for the Palestinians and Jordan is for the Jordanians and that the solution to the Palestinian problem is located on Palestinian soil and embodied by a Palestinian state.”
But during a question-and-answer session with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump waved off those statements when a reporter asked him about the situation.
“Mr. President, Egypt’s president and the King of Jordan have both said that they won’t take in displaced people from Gaza like you suggested. Is there anything you can do to make them do that? I mean, tariffs against those countries, for example?” the reporter asked.
“They will do it,” Trump said before pausing. “They will do it.”
“What makes you say that?” the reporter followed up.
“They’re going to do it, OK? We do a lot for them, and they’re going to do it,” the president said.
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On Monday aboard Air Force One, Trump also addressed the Egyptian and Jordanian refusals, saying that he had already been in contact with El-Sisi.
“I wish he would take some,” Trump told reporters, per the Washington Examiner. “We helped them a lot, and I’m sure he’d help us.”
Trump referred to El-Sisi as “a friend of mine,” leading a nation in “a very rough part of the world, to be honest.”
“As they say, it’s a rough neighborhood,” Trump added. “But I think he would do it, and I think the king of Jordan would do it too.”
Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are returning to northern Gaza amid the ongoing ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The region’s infrastructure and basic living conditions have been devastated by 15 months of intense warfare, leaving many areas uninhabitable and in dire need of humanitarian aid.
“There have been various civilizations on that strip. It didn’t start here. It started thousands of years before, and there’s always been violence associated with it,” Trump said Monday. “You could get people living in areas that are a lot safer and maybe a lot better and maybe a lot more comfortable.”
The president originally said during a press gaggle on Saturday that he would like to “build housing at a different location” for the refugees, either “temporarily or long-term,” with the help of El-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II so that Palestinians “can maybe live in peace for a change.”
Countries and institutions critical of Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank fear that the displacement of Palestinian residents to other nations could serve as a precursor to the full annexation of the territory, the Examiner said.
Many continue to advocate for a two-state solution, which would establish a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel. However, the mass relocation of Gazan residents is seen as a potential obstacle that could undermine efforts to achieve this long-sought resolution, the outlet added.
