Hamas condemns Trump's plan to ‘clean out’ Palestinians from Gaza

Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have condemned a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” the Gaza Strip.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump suggested cleaning out the Palestinian land and relocating the war-stricken people there to neighboring Arab countries, namely Egypt and Jordan.

"You're talking about probably a million and half people ... I'd like Egypt to take people. And I'd like Jordan to take people," he said. "[W]e just clean out that whole thing," he said. 

Trump added that he expected to talk to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday.

In the meantime, the Palestinian leaders and people in Gaza condemned any attempt to relocate them, saying such a move is reminiscent of a dark page in Palestine’s modern history known as the "Nakba" or catastrophe – when millions of Palestinians were forcibly displaced to create room for Israel's illegal creation. 

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

“We will not accept any offers or solutions, even if their apparent intentions are good under the banner of reconstruction, as proposed by US President Trump,” Naim clarified.

The Palestinian people, who have stood steadfast in the face of the most heinous acts of genocide in modern history—perpetrated by the occupation army—and have steadfastly resisted the crimes of forced displacement, particularly in northern Gaza, categorically reject any plans to displace or expel them from their land.

The Hamas official called on the US administration to abandon such proposals that align with the Israeli regime's expansionist schemes.

He said such plans conflict with the rights and free will of the Palestinian people.

"Instead, we urge it to support the Palestinian people's right to freedom, the establishment of their independent state with Al-Quds as its capital, and to pressure the criminal occupation to expedite the reconstruction of what it destroyed during its brutal war on Gaza, restoring life to normal in the Strip," he said.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other resistance groups including the Mujahideen Movement, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Resistance Committees all issued similar statements, slamming Trump's plan to relocate the Gazans.

Islamic Jihad called Trump’s plan to relocate the Gazans “deplorable”. It said that such plans encourage the Israelis to commit “war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land.”

Sisi, for his part, has already sounded the alarm about any "forced displacement" of the Palestinians from war-torn Gaza to Egypt.

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He said that forcing the Palestinians out of Gaza could even jeopardize the 1979 so-called peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

The Israelis launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian resistance groups carried out a retaliatory operation north of Gaza in response to decades of killing, damage, and loss inflicted on the Palestinians.

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