President Donald Trump says he has asked Jordan to accept Palestinians from Gaza and plans to press Egypt to do the same.
Trump said he spoke to Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Saturday, five days after being inaugurated for his second term and six days into a ceasefire that he pressed for in the Israel-Hamas war.
“I said to him I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people,” Trump told reporters Saturday night aboard Air Force One following a rally in Las Vegas. Calling Gaza “literally a demolition site right now,” he added, “I’d like Egypt to take people.”
While millions of Palestinian refugees have lived in Jordan since Israel’s founding in 1948, Arab states have since been resistant to accepting Palestinian refugees out of concern that doing so would aid ethnic cleansing and undercut pressure for Palestinian statehood.
Some on Israel’s far right would like to see Jewish resettlement in Gaza after the war and have called on Israel to encourage Palestinians to emigrate from the enclave. David Friedman, Trump’s’ ambassador to Israel during his first term, said this week that Trump could support encouraging emigration.
Asked whether he envisioned such a move as temporary, Trump said, “It could be temporary, could be permanent.”
Trump did not say how Jordan’s Abdullah responded. Just days after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel by Hamas that launched the war, the king said, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.”
Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, said the same thing at the time. Trump said he planned to speak to Sisi on Sunday.
Egypt and Jordan both have peace agreements with Israel. During his first term, Trump brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab nations, and he is seen as eager to strike a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“People are dying there,” Trump said about Gaza. “So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
Reconstruction of Gaza would begin under the third and final phase of the current ceasefire, which is less than a week into its six-week first phase.
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