PA president: Palestinians 'won't abandon their land'

Palestinians, Jordan, Egypt reject Trump’s idea to send Gazans out of Strip

Jordan’s FM also rejects suggestion, after US president says he discussed it with King Abdullah; Hamas politburo vows Palestinians will ‘foil such projects’ as they have in past

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks after his meeting with Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez at the Moncloa palace in Madrid, Spain, September 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks after his meeting with Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez at the Moncloa palace in Madrid, Spain, September 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas on Sunday condemned “any projects” to relocate the people of Gaza outside the Palestinian enclave after US President Donald Trump suggested moving them to Egypt and Jordan, adding to a chorus of rejection of the proposal from around the Arab world.

Without naming the US leader, Abbas “expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects aimed at displacing our people from the Gaza Strip,” a statement from his office said, adding that the Palestinian people “will not abandon their land and holy sites.”

Trump, less than a week into his second term as president, said on Saturday that he wanted Jordan and Egypt to take Palestinians from Gaza, suggesting “we just clean out that whole thing.”

The idea was swiftly rejected by Jordan Egypt.

In the statement issued by the PA presidency, based in the West Bank, Abbas said: “We will not allow the repetition of the catastrophes that befell our people in 1948 and 1967.”

The former date is known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which refers to the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel before and during the War of Independence in 1948, after the UN-proposed division of Mandatory Palestine was rejected by Arabs in Palestine and Arab states, who invaded Israel.

Members of security forces loyal to Hamas stand guard in front of a destroyed police compound in Gaza City, on January 22, 2025, on the fourth day of a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. (Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)

The 1967 war, during which Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, is known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “setback,” and saw several hundred thousand more displaced from those territories.

Abbas also rejected what he called “any policy that undermines the unity of the Palestinian land in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

He called on Trump to “continue his efforts to support” the Gaza hostage-ceasefire deal that came into effect on January 19 and said the Palestinian Authority remained ready to take on the governance of the war-battered territory.

Amid the fragile truce, which halted over 15 months of war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Palestinian terror groups in Gaza also reacted defiantly to Trump’s idea for the coastal enclave.

Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects”, as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable” and said it encouraged “war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land.”

Palestinians gather by a banner welcoming people near the rubble of a collapsed building along Gaza’s coastal al-Rashid Street for people to cross from the Netzarim Corridor from the southern Gaza Strip into Gaza City on January 26, 2025. (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP)

After 15 months of war, Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site,” adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory.

Nevertheless, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on Sunday, “Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Cairo’s foreign ministry in a statement expressed Egypt’s “continued support for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people on their land.”

It “rejected any infringement on those inalienable rights, whether by settlement or annexation of land, or by the depopulation of that land of its people through displacement, encouraged transfer or the uprooting of Palestinians from their land, whether temporarily or long-term.”

“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump had told reporters, adding he expected to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi on Sunday.

Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, which Sissi said could jeopardize the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.

Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.

“You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million.

“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump said.

US President Donald Trump speaks with the press, alongside White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (R), on board Air Force One after departing Las Vegas, Nevada, en route to Miami, Florida on January 25, 2025. (Mandel NGAN / AFP)

Moving Gaza’s inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he added.

In Israel, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza, said Trump’s suggestion of “helping them find other places to start a better life is a great idea.”

Almost all Gazans have been displaced by the war, which was sparked when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.

The United Nations says close to 70 percent of the territory’s buildings are damaged or destroyed.

On Sunday, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.

Israel announced on Saturday it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehoud, a civilian woman hostage who Netanyahu’s office said “was supposed to be released” according to the terms of the accord.

During the initial, 42-day phase of the Gaza truce, a total of 33 hostages are set to be released, not all of them are alive, and the condition of some of them is unknown. Hamas has yet to provide the status of all of them, which was due on the seventh day of the truce on Saturday. In exchange, Israel will free up to 1,904 Palestinian security prisoners including murderers.

Operatives of the Hamas terror group’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades hand over Israeli hostages Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Karina Ariev and Daniella Gilboa to the Red Cross in Palestine Square, in Gaza City. (Ayman Alhesi/Flash90)

The truce has also brought a surge of food, fuel medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”

Eighty-seven of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 46,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

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