People watch television on the streets of Khan Younis in southern Gaza on January 15, 2025, as the war between Israel and Hamas continues in the Palestinian territories.
Bashar Taleb | AFP | Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s Suggestions that Egypt and Jordan take in Palestinians from the war-torn Gaza Strip are likely to be staunchly rejected by the two U.S. allies and by Palestinians who fear Israel will never allow them to return.
Trump floated the idea on Saturday, saying he would urge the leaders of the two Arab countries to accommodate Gaza’s now largely homeless population so “we can clean this whole thing up.” He added that the resettlement of Gaza’s population “could be temporary or long-term.”
“This is actually a demolition site right now,” Trump said, referring to the massive damage caused by Israel’s 15-month military campaign against Hamas, now paused by a fragile ceasefire.
“I would rather work with some Arab countries to build housing in different places where they might be able to live peacefully and seek change,” Trump said.
There was no immediate comment from Egyptian, Jordanian, Israeli or Palestinian officials.
The idea is likely to be welcomed by Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right governing partner has long advocated large-scale voluntary Palestinian immigration and the rebuilding of Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Rights groups have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, which U.N. experts define as a policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to expel civilians of another group from certain areas “through violence and incitement to terror.”
A history of displacement
Before and during the 1948 war over the creation of the state of Israel, some 700,000 Palestinians (the majority of the pre-war population) fled or were driven from their homes in Israel, an event they commemorate as the “Nakba” (Arabic, meaning disaster).
Israel refuses to allow them to return because it would result in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Currently, there are approximately 6 million refugees and their descendants, with large communities in Gaza (where they make up the majority of the population), as well as in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
During the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, another 300,000 Palestinians fled, mostly to Jordan.
The decades-long refugee crisis has been a major driver of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and one of the thorniest issues in the 2009 peace talks. surrounding Arab countries.
Many Palestinians see the recent war in Gaza as a new catastrophe, in which entire communities have been destroyed by shelling and 90% of the population of 2.3 million have been forced from their homes. They fear that if Palestinians leave Gaza in large numbers, they may never return.
The steadfastness to remain in one’s own land is at the heart of Palestinian culture, and this was vividly demonstrated in Gaza on Sunday, when thousands tried to return to the most devastated part of the territory.
Red lines in Egypt and Jordan
Early in the war, some Israeli officials floated the idea of ​​accepting Gaza refugees, to which Egypt and Jordan strongly opposed.
Both countries have made peace with Israel but support the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territory Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. They fear the permanent displacement of Gaza’s people could make that goal impossible.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has also warned of the security implications of moving large numbers of Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, which borders Gaza.
Hamas and other militant groups are deeply entrenched in Palestinian society and are likely to operate alongside the refugees, meaning future wars will be fought on Egyptian soil, potentially undermining the historic Camp David peace treaty that is the cornerstone of regional stability.
“The peace we have achieved will disappear from our hands,” Sisi said after Hamas attacks in southern Israel in October 2023 triggered war. “This is all about eliminating the Palestinian cause.”
This is what happened in Lebanon in the 1970s, when Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, the leading militant group at the time, turned southern Lebanon into a launchpad for attacks on Israel tower. In 1975, the refugee crisis and the actions of the PLO pushed Lebanon into a 15-year civil war.
Jordan, which clashed with the PLO in 1970 and expelled them under similar circumstances, now hosts more than 2 million Palestinian refugees, most of whom have been granted citizenship.
Israeli ultranationalists have long proposed treating Jordan as a Palestinian state so that Israel could retain the West Bank, which they consider the biblical center of the Jewish people. The Jordanian royal family strongly opposes this situation.
Can Trump force allies to take in refugees?
It depends on how serious Trump is about the idea and how far he is prepared to go.
U.S. tariffs – one of Trump’s favorite economic tools – or outright sanctions could be devastating for Jordan and Egypt. Both countries receive billions of dollars in U.S. aid each year, while Egypt is already mired in an economic crisis.
But allowing an influx of refugees could also be destabilizing. Egypt says it currently hosts about 9 million migrants, including refugees from Sudan’s civil war. Jordan, with a population of less than 12 million, hosts more than 700,000 refugees, mainly from Syria.
U.S. pressure also threatens to alienate key regional allies with whom Trump has good relations — not just Sisi and King Abdullah II of Jordan, but also the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, who have Support the Palestinian cause.
That could complicate efforts to broker a historic deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations, something Trump tried to do during his last term and hopes to complete during his current term this task.
