Palestinian resistance group Hamas has condemned US president Donald Trump’s insistence on expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip as “absurd and meaningless”, amid regional outcry over the proposal.
Last weekend, newly-elected president Trump suggested that Israel should “clean out” Gaza by forcibly resettling Palestinians from there to Egypt and Jordan – a proposal which sparked international and regional outcry and which resulted in outright refusal from Cairo and Amman.
In a press statement on Saturday, Hamas further condemned the proposal, with senior Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri saying that “plans to displace Palestinians from Gaza are absurd and meaningless”. He asserted that “what the Israeli occupation failed to achieve by force, will not be accomplished through political maneuvers.”
Calling the reported plans “a recipe for further chaos and tension in the region”, Abu Zuhri stated that “the repeated US announcements on displacing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip under the pretext of its reconstruction reflect a persistent complicity in the crime”.
A six-nation Arab ministerial meeting in Cairo on Saturday also firmly rejected displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and reiterated the call for the implementation of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Anadolu Agency reports.
The meeting, held at Egypt’s invitation and attended by representatives from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Jordan, Palestine, and the Arab League, issued a joint statement stressing the importance of working toward a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.
Trump’s proposal has received widespread condemnation, with critics calling it “ethnic cleansing” and a “war crime.” Many countries in the Muslim and Arab world as well as European nations such as France have firmly rejected the idea.
