A suggestion by President Trump to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians raised new questions on Sunday about United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East.
Mr. Trump’s comments appeared to echo the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza — an idea that goes to the heart of Palestinian fears that they will be driven from their remaining homelands.
“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Mr. Trump said of Gaza on Saturday. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”
Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan about the issue, saying, “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’” He added that he would also like Egypt to take in more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, about the issue.
He said that Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long-term.”
It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s comments if he was suggesting that all of the people in Gaza leave. The enclave has a population of about two million.
The suggestion by Mr. Trump was rejected on Sunday by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.
“The Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured death and destruction over 15 months in one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 21st century, simply to stay on their land and homeland,” said Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, referring to the war that started with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “Therefore, they will not accept any proposals or solutions, even if seemingly well-intentioned under the guise of reconstruction, as proposed by U.S. President Trump.”
But the idea appeared to be welcomed by two hard-line Israeli politicians.
Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a statement on X on Sunday that appeared to refer to Mr. Trump’s comments, although he did not mention the U.S. president.
“After 76 years in which most of the population of Gaza was held by force under harsh conditions to maintain the ambition to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of helping them find other places to start a new, good life is a great idea,” he said. “After years of sanctifying terror, they will be able to establish a new, good life elsewhere.”
Mr. Smotrich has long advocated for helping Gazans who want to leave to depart and for the Israeli military to remain in the enclave in order to pave the way for eventual Jewish settlement there.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right former minister who resigned from the government over the Gaza cease-fire deal but said he would return if the fighting resumed, said on X, “Congratulations to US President Trump on the initiative to transfer residents from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt.”
Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while others now live in other Arab countries — including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — and around the world. But Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected any further resettlement outside Palestinian territories, saying that forcing Palestinians to leave would mean erasing any hope of a future Palestinian state. Without land, they say, there is no country.
Egyptian fears that Palestinians moving en masse into Egypt could threaten the country’s security also make it unlikely that it will consent to any such arrangement. Jordan also opposes forced resettlement of Palestinians. Neither country had publicly responded to Mr. Trump’s suggestion by early Sunday afternoon.
Early in the war, Egypt became so concerned about the prospect of any move that would send Gazans spilling into its territory that it warned Israel that it was jeopardizing the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.
Mr. Trump made his remarks about Gaza on an evening flight after a rally in Las Vegas. It is unclear whether they signal a change in U.S. policy toward Palestinians.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other recent presidents other than Mr. Trump, the United States officially supported establishing a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, criticized Israeli extremist attempts at seizing more Palestinian land by building settlements on it and assured Egypt that it would not be forced to take in more Palestinians.
But with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, all of the assumptions that had undergirded American relationships in the Middle East may now be upended.
Egypt and Jordan are both major U.S. partners in the region, and successive U.S. administrations have regarded their stability as crucial to that of the wider Middle East. They both receive significant U.S. funding, with Egypt the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.
The Trump administration issued a memo on Friday suddenly freezing all foreign aid for a 90-day reassessment period, but laid out two major exceptions: weapons support to Israel and Egypt. It is unclear if Mr. Trump would try to use the military aid that Egypt receives as leverage to try to force it to accept more Palestinian refugees.
The fear of being driven from Gaza runs especially deep among Palestinians, who reject it as a replay of what they call the Nakba — or “catastrophe” in Arabic — the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the war surrounding Israel’s creation as a state. Many Palestinians still yearn to return eventually to their pre-1948 homes, even if they now sit on Israeli territory.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are trying to return to their homes as the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel enters a second week. It is only the second pause in fighting between the two since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since then, Israel’s military has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. It has also destroyed thousands of homes and buildings in Gaza and killed many of Hamas’s leaders.
Most of the two million Palestinians in Gaza have had to flee their homes at least once. And though aid in recent days has increased, the humanitarian situation remains dire, with water, food and medicine running low and few working hospitals left.
Andrés R. Martínez and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.
