Donald Trump has said that his plan to “take over Gaza” would not include a right of return for the more than 2 million Palestinians that he has said have “no alternative” but to leave because of the destruction left by Israel’s military campaign.
The remarks are the latest effective endorsement of ethnic cleansing by the US president, who announced his plan last week during a summit with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to the outrage of the Arab world and the surprise of even his closest aides.
In the interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, Trump said that he would “own” the Gaza Strip and declared it would be a “real estate development for the future”.
At the same time, he continued to endorse a plan for the Palestinians to be resettled in Egypt and Jordan, a plan that both countries have rejected and the region’s largest Arab states have declared is a non-starter.
Trump said he would build up to six new sites for Palestinians to live outside Gaza, in effect permanent refugee camps underwritten by the US president.
Asked if Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza, Trump told Baier: “No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing.
“Could be five, six, could be two,” he said. “But we’ll build safe communities, a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is.
“In other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them because if they have to return now, it’ll be years before you could ever – it’s not habitable,” he said.
No serious discussions have so far taken place in the Pentagon or the state department regarding how the US could legally or logistically handle the task proposed by Trump.
But the announcement was welcomed by Israel’s far-right settler movement, as well as their evangelical allies in the US who have endorsed the annexation of the Gaza Strip and other occupied Palestinian territories, including the West Bank.
“In the meantime, I would own this,” Trump said of Gaza. “Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. No big money spent.”
On Sunday, the head of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Navi Pillay, told Politico, a news website, that Trump’s plan for the “forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing”.
“There is no way under the law that Trump could carry out the threat to dislocate Palestinians from their land,” Pillay said.
More than 1.5 million Palestinians and their descendants who lost their homes during the 1948 Arab–Israeli war currently live in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
