Egypt said privately warning Trump’s Gaza plan endangers peace treaty with Israel
Officials say message has been passed to State Department and members of Congress and also conveyed to Israel and its Western European allies, including Britain, France and Germany
CAIRO — Egypt has launched a behind-the-scenes diplomatic blitz to try to head off US President Donald Trump’s proposal for the mass relocation of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Egypt has warned that such a plan could undermine its peace treaty with Israel, a cornerstone of stability and American influence in the Middle East for decades.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has not publicly responded to Trump’s stunning proposal that most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians be relocated and the United States take charge of rebuilding the territory. The 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas, which began when the Palestinian terror group led thousands of terrorists on a devastating invasion of southern Israel, had reduced large parts of Gaza to rubble before a fragile ceasefire took hold last month.
But Egyptian officials, speaking Wednesday on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said Cairo has made clear to the Trump administration and Israel that it will resist any such proposal, and that the peace deal with Israel — which has stood for nearly half a century — is at risk.
One official said the message has been delivered to the Pentagon, the State Department, and members of the US Congress. A second official said it has also been conveyed to Israel and its Western European allies, including Britain, France, and Germany.
A Western diplomat in Cairo, also speaking anonymously because the discussions have not been made public, confirmed receiving the message from Egypt through multiple channels. The diplomat said Egypt was very serious and viewed the plan as a threat to its national security.
The diplomat said Egypt had rejected proposals from the Biden administration and European countries to take in some Gazan refugees early in the war, which was sparked by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The earlier proposals were broached privately, while Trump announced his plan at a White House press conference alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Trump administration has already dialed back aspects of the proposal after it was widely rejected internationally, saying the relocation of Palestinians would be temporary. US officials have provided few details about how or when the plan was intended to be carried out.
In a social media post on Thursday, Trump said Israel would turn Gaza over to the United States after the war and that no US soldiers would be needed for his plan to redevelop it.
The Palestinians have vehemently rejected Trump’s proposal, fearing that refugees would never be allowed to return.
Saudi Arabia, another key US ally, has also rejected any mass transfer of Palestinians and says it will not normalize relations with Israel — a key goal of the Trump administration — without the creation of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza.
Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal on Thursday slamed Trump’s proposal, calling it a “mad ethnic cleansing plan” in lockstep with the agenda of Israel’s far right.
“It is a fantasy to think that ethnic cleansing in the 21st century can be condoned… There’s no way that I can explain it,” he said, warning that the plan will cause “more conflict and more bloodshed.”
He called on the international community to take the matter up in the United Nations, but noted that “with the American veto, I cannot expect that there will be much success in passing any resolution.”
Trump and Israeli officials have depicted the proposed relocation from war-ravaged Gaza as voluntary, but the Palestinians have universally expressed their determination to remain in their homeland.
Trump and Israeli officials have not said how they would respond if Palestinians refuse to leave. But Human Rights Watch and other groups say the plan, if implemented, would amount to “ethnic cleansing,” the forcible relocation of the civilian population of an ethnic group from a geographic area.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said he has ordered the military to make preparations to facilitate the voluntary emigration of large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza through land crossings as well as “special arrangements for exit by sea and air.”
There were no immediate signs of such preparations on the ground and Israeli officials stressed that this was only for Palestinians who wanted to leave.
US officials scale back Trump’s proposal
Trump said he wanted to “permanently” resettle most of Gaza’s population in other countries and for the United States to take charge of clearing debris and rebuilding Gaza as a “Riviera of the Middle East” for all people. He did not rule out the deployment of US troops there.
US officials later appeared to walk it back, saying the relocation of Palestinians would be temporary and that Trump had not committed to putting American boots on the ground or spending American tax dollars in Gaza.
The Egyptian officials said their government does not believe the Palestinians need to be relocated for reconstruction to proceed and is committed to the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, territories Israel gained control of in the 1967 Six Day War.
Israel’s government is opposed to Palestinian statehood and has said it will maintain open-ended security control over both Gaza and the West Bank. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in a move not recognized by most of the international community and considers the entire city its capital. Trump during his first term of office moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in a move seen as giving legitimacy to Israel’s holding of the unified city.
Last week, Egypt hosted a meeting of top diplomats from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — which was the driving force behind the 2020 Abraham Accords Trump brokered with Israel. All five Arab nations rejected the transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza or the West Bank.
In an editorial on Thursday, Egypt’s main state-run daily, Al-Ahram, warned that “the Arab countries’ independence, their peoples’ unity and their territorial integrity are under grave threat.”
