Trump had made comments concerning the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza at least three times in less than a week [Getty/file photo]
US President Donald Trump insisted on Thursday that Egypt and Jordan would take in displaced Gazans, despite the two Arab nations dismissing his plan to move Palestinians from the war-battered territory.
Trump’s comments came a day after Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II rejecting any forced displacement of Gazans following Israel’s war in the Palestinian enclave.
“They will do it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked for his response to the Egyptian and Jordanian refusal, and whether he would consider imposing tariffs on either country to push them.
“They’re going to do it. We do a lot for them, and they’re going to do it.”
After an Israel-Hamas ceasefire took effect on 19 January, Trump last week floated a plan to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and for Palestinians to move to “safer” locations such as Egypt or Jordan. His comments withdrew outrage from Palestinians, and swift condemnations from much of the Arab world’s foreign ministries.
He said the 15-month war had reduced the Palestinian territory to a “demolition site.”
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made a rare trip to Gaza this week, the White House said, in a bid to prop up the fragile ceasefire. He also met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Egypt’s Sisi, a key US ally, had said on Wednesday in his first public response to Trump’s comments that displacing “the Palestinian people from their land is an injustice that we cannot take part in”.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II separately stressed his country’s “firm position on the need to keep the Palestinians on their land”.
Since the start of the Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023, both Egypt and Jordan have warned of plans to displace Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank across their borders.
