Ethnic cleansing feared as Trump asks Jordan, Egypt to take Gaza residents

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, calls on Egypt and Jordan to “just clean out” Gaza.

Trump said he had a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah II earlier on Saturday and would speak with Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi later on Sunday while speaking with reporters on Air Force One.

“I would like Egypt to take people”, Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘ You know, it’s over. ‘”

Trump claimed he had praised Jordan for welcoming Palestinian refugees and that he had told the king that he would love for him to “take on more” because the Gaza Strip is a mess right now. It’s a real mess”.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza displaced almost the entire 2.3 million people in Gaza, some of them multiple times. Trump said people in Gaza could move either temporarily or permanently.

He claimed that almost everything has been destroyed and that there are still people dying there.

“So, I would rather get involved with some of the Arab countries and construct housing there so that they can perhaps live peacefully for a change.”

However, Abdullah Al-Arian, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, claimed that Israeli officials had indicated to “ethnically cleanse” as much of the Palestinian territory as possible at “very early in the course of the war.”

One of the reasons that led to that plan was that Arab leaders who were approached at the time simply refused to accept an additional Palestinian refugee population, in part because it was politically untenable in Egypt, which had been suggested as a potential location for a large ethnic cleansing of Gaza, said he.

Al-Arian claimed that Trump’s proposal would not appeal to Palestinians. He continued, “They know all too well what it means to leave their homes and what Palestinian refugees’ conditions have been for the past 70 years,” adding that the US president’s remarks “should not be taken seriously.”

Meanwhile, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed Trump’s idea to relocate Gaza’s residents to Egypt and Jordan.

“It’s a great idea to assist them in finding new places to start a better life.” After years of glorifying terrorism, they will be able to establish new and good lives in other places”, Smotrich said in a statement.

“Only out-of-the-box thinking with new solutions will bring a solution of peace and security”, he said.

“I will, with God’s help, work with the prime minister and the cabinet to ensure there is an operational plan to implement this as soon as possible”, Smotrich said.

Any attempt to relocate Palestinians from Gaza would elicit skeptics’ memories of the “Nakba” or catastrophe, which was the systematic displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948.

Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza to the Sinai desert, which, according to El-Sisi, could threaten the 1979 peace agreement Egypt and Israel signed.

Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.

Sending 2, 000-pound bombs

Israel’s 15-month war on the Palestinian enclave killed more than 47, 000 people, though residents and activists say the actual toll could be much higher. The region’s continued bombing has also caused a large portion of it to be inruins, according to the UN, which will require several years for reconstruction.

However, Trump also said he has ended his predecessor’s hold on sending 2, 000-pound (907kg) bombs to Israel. “We released them today”, Trump said of the bombs. “They’ve been waiting for them for a long time”.

Asked why he lifted the ban on those bombs, Trump responded, “Because they bought them”.

Due to concerns about the potential impact of those bombs on the civilian population, then-President Joe Biden had put a hold on the delivery of those bombs.

A 2, 000-pound bomb has a destruction radius of 35 metres (115 feet), according to the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA).

The US has historically supplied substantial foreign aid to Israel, a total of $297bn (adjusted for inflation) between 1946 and 2023, $216bn of which was in military aid and $81bn in economic aid, according to data from the US Agency for International Aid (USAID).

Israel is the&nbsp, largest cumulative recipient of US aid since its founding.

Source: Aljazeera