
Displaced Palestinians wait along the Salah al-Din road in Nuseirat to cross to the northern part of the Gaza Strip on January 26, 2025. AFP
A senior Hamas official told AFP on Sunday that the Palestinian group would oppose Trump's idea to relocate Gazans to Egypt and Jordan.
"As they have foiled every plan for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades, our people will also foil such projects," said Bassem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, referring to Trump's comments.
On Saturday evening, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said he had told Jordan's King Abdullah II: "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."
The US president said he planned to present the same proposal to the Egyptian president on Sunday.
"You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," he added.
"Almost everything is demolished and people are dying there. So I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where maybe they can live in peace for a change."
The US president's proposal appeared to align with the decades-old Israeli plan to expel more than five million Palestinians living in the occupied territories that Israel captured in the 1967 war against Arab countries.
Last fall, on the campaign trail to return to the White House for a second term, then-candidate Trump, who recognized Jerusalem as the "eternal capital" of the State of Israel and the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights during his first term in office (2016-2020), lamented that Israel was a small country which might need more space.
This widely discussed Zionist dream of ethnically cleansing Historic Palestine of the remaining Arab native population, known in the Zionist lexicon as the transfer plan, would be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba when Zionist militias expelled 70 per cent of the Palestinians through massacres and terror campaigns to found the state of Israel.
After failing to force any of the 2.4 million population to flee Gaza during 15 months of its genocidal war on the strip, Israeli officials and politicians have reiterated their call for the "voluntary" displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to countries around the world.
On Sunday, Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem told Al-Arabiya TV that Trump's remarks are dangerous and align with the positions of the extremist Israeli right wing.
"Trump's proposal will not pass, and no Palestinian will accept it," Qassem added.
In tandem, the Islamic Jihad Movement slammed Trump's idea as an encouragement of "war crimes."
"We strongly condemn the US president’s remarks regarding the deportation of our people in the Gaza Strip from their land," the Islamic Jihad stated.
The group described Trump’s comments as aligning with the worst elements of the extremist Zionist right-wing agenda and a continuation of the denial of the Palestinian people's existence.
"Trump's remarks encourage the continuation of war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land," the statement read.
Islamic Jihad called on all countries, especially Egypt and Jordan, to reject Trump's plan and affirmed that the Palestinian people will defeat this scheme.
According to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) classifies these actions as war crimes.
Egypt has repeatedly rejected any "forced displacement" of all or part of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula desert.
Similarly, Amman has rejected all Israeli talk of Jordan as a home for the 3-million-plus Palestinians in the West Bank.
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