US President Donald Trump continued to speak of plans to force Egypt and Jordan to take over half the population of Gaza this week, with the latest comments made on Tuesday in the presence of visiting Jordanian King Abdullah, despite repeated statements from Cairo and Amman against the plans that were first proposed during a visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington over a week ago.
Trump had gone as far as to threaten, on Monday, to withhold aid from the two countries if they do not comply with requests to take in Palestinians from Gaza, so that the United States can “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip and rebuild it, displacing the people who live there to another “permanent place” in the process.
“If they don’t [take the Palestinians], I would conceivably withhold aid, yes,” Trump said. On Tuesday, Trump said that he is 99 per cent confident that he can reach a deal on the matter without having to impose punitive measures.
Trump’s scheme, which has been forcefully welcomed by Netanyahu and other far-right Israeli politicians, came as Egypt and Qatar were working hard to maintain a fragile truce in the 15-month Israeli war on Gaza that started on 7 October 2023 and came about on the eve of the inauguration of Trump on 20 January.
On Tuesday morning, an informed Egyptian source said that the Palestinian group Hamas had told Egyptian and Qatari mediators that it believes that with Trump’s backing Netanyahu is likely to resume his war rather than move from the first to the second phase of the three-stage ceasefire.
“It looks as if Netanyahu is going to relaunch his war to force the Palestinians to seek refuge outside Gaza. Egypt is concerned that this is part of a plan to force Cairo to open its borders for an influx of Palestinians and eventually allow the Trump plan to be executed,” the source added.
Both President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and King Abdullah have made public statements against the proposal.
Speaking to the press following the first session of his talks with Trump at the White House on Tuesday evening, Abdullah said that Arab countries will be meeting to decide a collective position and that Egypt has a plan that will be shared with the US.
It was not immediately clear in Cairo when the Egyptian proposal will be shared with the US, especially that Al-Sisi’s visit to Washington was postponed. Cairo is slated to host an Arab Summit on 27 February. Reports indicate that Cairo has prepared two reconstruction plans for Gaza that do not involve the displacement of its residents.
“This is a very delicate moment for Egyptian-American relations,” said an Egyptian official.
He argued that bilateral relations cannot be reduced to one issue that is subject to disagreement, “especially in view of the fact that the Palestinians have made it very clear that they will not leave their land, come what may.”
Egypt and the US have been closely linked on the political, economic, and military fronts since the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in 1979. Their close relations serve the interests of both countries and cannot simply be dropped, he stated.
According to Egyptian diplomats with first-hand experience of Egyptian-American relations over the past 40 years, the present disagreement is even worse than the one that Egypt and the US had in 2003 over the US-led invasion of Iraq.
According to the Egyptian official, there is much work being done, beyond the clear statements that President Al-Sisi and Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty have made, to express Egypt’s refusal to take part in a scheme to forcibly displace over a million Palestinians from Gaza.
This is not only because it would be “an act of extreme injustice”, but also because it is “an outright violation of international legitimacy and the indelible rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to independence… and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.”
The official added that the statements issued in Cairo to contest the Trump plan are among the most strongly worded in a decade. “They are statements of firm positions based on international law,” he stressed.
He explained that “Egypt does not want to get into a fight with Trump,” but rather wants the president of the US to realise the consequences of his proposal, not just for the states of the region but also for US interests in the Middle East.
A statement issued on Monday evening by the office of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his meeting with his Egyptian counterpart made no reference to the issue, despite confirmation from diplomatic sources that the subject was on the agenda of the talks. However, a statement issued by the office of the Egyptian top diplomat said that Abdelatty spoke with his US counterpart about the need to start reconstruction in Gaza without moving the population out.
The Egyptian source said that Egypt is working to lobby US “understanding” of the possibly “grave consequences of this push by President Trump.”
“We think that any attempt to forcibly expel the Palestinians from their land in Gaza, or for that matter the West Bank, will wreak havoc in the region and open the door to an upsurge of radical Islamist movements across the Arab countries and elsewhere in the Muslim [majority] world,” he said.
This message, he added, is being relayed to members of the US administration, think tanks, and congressmen during the current visit of Abdelatty to the US capital.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian official said that during the past few days Cairo has been heavily lobbying Arab support. He said that the Arab Summit that Egypt is planning to host is bound to issue “a very clear and uncompromising statement.”
He added that Egypt has “significant Arab support”, irrespective of the positions of some Arab capitals that are also being lobbied by Washington.
He also said that there is very significant support from member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and from several influential European capitals that share the worry over the consequences of the Trump plan for Gaza.
The official said that it is “very clear” for policy-makers in Cairo that Trump is not going to settle for a refusal of his plan, which is being pushed hard by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the leaders of the extreme religious right both in the US and Israel.
He added that Trump’s repeated statements on the scheme to get the Palestinians out of Gaza is adding further risks to an already fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and is putting pressure on the peaceful relations that Israel has with its Arab neighbours.
Last week saw an unusual exchange of verbal criticisms between Egypt and Israel over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the way to manage the situation. Egypt also criticised Israel for the shocking statements made by Netanyahu on the possibility of Saudi Arabia setting up a Palestinian state on Saudi territory.
Meanwhile, on Monday Hamas announced that in response to Trump’s statements it would suspend the hand-over of a new group of Israeli hostages as part of the prisoner-swap deal that has gone into effect with the ceasefire. The decision was made shortly after a high-ranking Hamas delegation arrived in Tehran for talks with Iranian officials.
Trump said on Monday that “all hell is going to break out” if the hand-over of the hostages is not executed promptly on Saturday.
“We were hoping to build on the ceasefire and to start to decompress the tension that has prevailed during the past 15 months, but the statements of President Trump have re-ignited this tension and taken it to a much higher level,” the Egyptian official said.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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