Getty ImagesThe Palestinian president has said he strongly rejects President Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over Gaza and resettle the 2.1 million Palestinians living there.
“We will not allow the rights of our people… to be infringed on,” Mahmoud Abbas stressed, warning that Gaza was “an integral part of the State of Palestine” and forced displacement would be a serious violation of international law.
Hamas, whose 15-month war with Israel has caused widespread devastation, said Trump’s plan would “put oil on the fire” in the region.
The idea has been rejected by countries in the region such as Jordan and Egypt, and key US allies, while the UN issued a warning against “any form of ethnic cleansing”.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Gaza was an integral part of a future Palestinian state, telling a meeting in New York the rights of Palestinians to live as human beings in their own land was slipping further out of reach.
The world, he said, had “seen a chilling, systematic dehumanisation and demonisation of an entire people”.
Saudi Arabia said Palestinians would “not move” from their land and it would not normalise ties with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Trump’s proposal could “change history” and was “worth paying attention to”.
Later on Wednesday, the White House sought to clarify President Trump’s proposal, with spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt telling journalists the president was committed to rebuilding Gaza and “temporarily” relocating its residents. Trump said on Tuesday the displacement would be permanent.
She also said the president had not committed to sending US troops to Gaza.
Trump’s comments come two weeks after the start of a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, during which Hamas has released some 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 47,540 people have been killed and 111,600 injured 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.
Trump’s first major remarks on Middle East policy shattered decades of US thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday night, alongside the visiting Israeli prime minister.
“We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings.”
Trump said Palestinians living in Gaza would have to be relocated to achieve his vision of creating “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and that they would be housed in Jordan, Egypt and other countries.
When asked whether the refugees would eventually be allowed to return, he said that “the world’s people” would live in Gaza, before adding “also Palestinians”.
Trump also brushed aside previous objections from Jordan and Egypt’s leaders to taking in refugees, insisting that they would eventually “open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done”.
Netanyahu later said there was nothing wrong with idea of “allowing the Gazans who want to leave to leave” the territory.
“They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back. But you have to rebuild Gaza,” he told Fox News on Wednesday.
A unnamed senior Israeli official was also quoted as saying that Trump’s ideas surpassed all his “expectations and dreams”.
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the proposal was “the real answer to 7 October” and pledged to “definitively bury… the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state”.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterised the plan as a “generous offer” to rebuild Gaza, not as a hostile takeover.
And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised Trump’s “outside the box” thinking and said the Pentagon was “prepared to look at all options” related to the enclave.
The Palestinian leadership condemned the plan in a statement issued on Wednesday.
“These calls represent a serious violation of international law,” Abbas said, adding that “peace and stability will not be achieved in the region without the establishment of a Palestinian state”.
Abbas leads Hamas rivals Fatah and governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
He declared that Palestinians would not “give up their land, rights, and sacred sites” and that the Gaza Strip was an “integral part of the land of the State of Palestine, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem”.
The head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot, told the BBC: “It’s a call for ethnic cleansing, for the forced displacement and expulsion of a people from their native land. It is immoral, it is illegal, and it is dangerous.”
Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the UK and other countries – said in a statement that Trump was “aiming for the United States to occupy the Gaza Strip”.
It warned that his proposal was “aggressive to our people and cause, won’t serve stability in the region and will only put oil on the fire”.
Palestinians in Gaza also said the plan was completely out of the question.
“We have endured nearly a year and a half of bombings and destruction, yet we remain in Gaza,” one man told BBC Arabic.
“We would rather die in Gaza than leave it. We will stay here until we rebuild it. Trump can do as he pleases, but we firmly reject his decisions.”
Palestinians also 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, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.
Israel 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.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said the kingdom “unequivocally rejected” Trump’s proposal and said it would continue its efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state.
Egypt’s foreign minister said he had agreed with the Palestinian Authority prime minister on the importance on moving forward with “early recovery projects” without Palestinians leaving Gaza.
While Jordan’s King Abdulla said he rejected any attempts to “annex land or displace Palestinians”, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said it was “absurd to even consider” the relocation of Palestinians from Gaza.
Western governments also expressed alarm about any forced displacement.
France’s foreign ministry said it would mean a “serious violation of international law” an attack on the Palestinian aspirations and would represent a “major obstacle to the two-state solution”.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Palestinians “must be allowed home”.
“They must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution,” he told Parliament.
