US President Donald Trump’s demands for Jordan and Egypt to take in what could be millions of Palestinians deported from Gaza under the president’s stated plan for the devastated territory have been met with a fierce backlash from the Arab world. But with both nations deeply dependent on US military and economic aid, Washington could bring a lot of pressure to bear on the beleaguered countries.
Issued on: 06/02/2025
FRANCE24
By: Paul MILLAR
Displaced Palestinian children sit on a sand mound overlooking tents set up amid destroyed buildings in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on February 6, 2025. © Bashar Taleb, AFP
Former real estate developer and current US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the US would administer the devastated Gaza Strip, displacing the more than 2 million Palestinians living there during the coastal territory’s reconstruction, has been met with horror across the Arab world. And nowhere more – with the obvious exception of Gaza – than in Jordan and Egypt, the two countries that Trump has promised will host this new generation of dispossessed Palestinians, regardless of their objections.
The Israelis certainly seem to be taking the idea seriously. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz on Thursday ordered the country’s armed forces to begin work on a plan to facilitate what he described as the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians living in Gaza.
Using force, or the threat of force, to displace a people living under military occupation is a war crime banned under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whose government depends on the support of far-right figures who have championed the mass emigration of Palestinians from Gaza and the return of Jewish settlers to the coastal territory for years, described Trump’s plan as a “remarkable” idea.
But Jalal Al Husseini, an associate researcher at the French Institute for the Near East in Amman, said that any plan involving the mass movement of Palestinians from Gaza would be met with fierce resistance across the Arab world.
“The Arab states have opposed any idea of any resettlement or de-Palestinisation of Palestine, especially the occupied Palestinian territories – which is also one of the aims of the far-right Israeli parties,” he said. “And that’s been one of the mainstays of the Arab states’ policies since 1967 – opposition to any large-scale displacement.”
Read more How serious is he? Trump's plan for Gaza
Nor, he said, was the idea of displacing Palestinians to Jordan a new one. Leaders from Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party have long called for Palestinians living in the occupied territories to find a new homeland across the Jordan River – leaving the land between the river and the sea to be annexed by the Israeli state.
“Since the late 70s, when the Likud won the elections and became the ruling party for the first time, they always championed this idea that eventually – and this is one of the very early claims of this movement – eventually, Jordan should be the alternative state or homeland of the Palestinians,” he said. “So any large-scale displacement of Palestinians to Jordan tends to support or validate this claim – that Jordan should be the alternative state of the Palestinians.” About half of Jordan’s population is believed to be of Palestinian origin.
Egypt has also been wary of receiving large numbers of people displaced by the fighting. In the early days of Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, the Biden administration reached out to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to try to convince the US-backed government to allow refugees to cross into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula via the Rafah Crossing. Cairo flatly rejected the idea, even bussing Egyptians from across the country to Rafah to lead state-sponsored demonstrations against Israel’s attempts to displace the people of Gaza.
Reem Abou-El-Fadl, a senior lecturer in comparative politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London, said that the Egyptian position was unlikely to have softened since then.
“I don’t think much has changed in their minds,” she said. “You can see this by the alarmist and alarmed tone of public media at the moment, just as it was in October 2023, where all the state-sponsored TV channels and talk shows are singing from the same hymn sheet about the threat to the Palestinian cause, the unity of Egyptian and Palestinian positions and their inalienable right to return.”
Read more Israel is committing ‘ethnic cleansing’ amid mass forced displacements in Gaza, HRW report says
Fadl said that Sisi, who seized power from democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi in a 2013 coup, has had to walk a thin line between suppressing attempts to organise support for the Palestinian cause and expressing public solidarity with Gaza in the face of Israel’s onslaught.
“When it comes to popular sentiment, which is in the majority viscerally opposed to the Israeli settler colonial project and vocally supportive of Palestinians, the regime stands to forfeit more of its already weak public support, or rather to force Egyptians out of their disgruntled silence, if it participates in a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza,” she said.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II this week also repeated his opposition to any attempts to displace the Palestinian people and annex their land. But despite their stark rejections of Trump’s plan, both countries remain deeply vulnerable to US pressure.
The US is Jordan’s single-largest aid provider, sending the Hashemite Kingdom $1.45 billion every year in bilateral foreign assistance. Egypt, for its part, received $1.3 billion in military aid in 2024. US military support for Cairo rose steeply after the country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, amounting to more than $50 billion in total since then. Egypt and Jordan are both in the top four recipients of US aid across the world – behind only Ukraine and Israel.
“The United States are one of the main donors of Jordan, both on the military side and in terms of socio-economic assistance as well,” Husseini said. “And this is one of the instruments that the US could use to talk Jordan into accepting a certain number of Gazans now. So it will be a showdown between the US and Jordan – and Egypt – around this issue.”
Gilad Wenig, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the US could already have begun to put its financial leverage over Egypt to use in the first days of the Gaza campaign.
“Egyptian reports suggest that the US offered financial incentives including debt relief to Egypt in exchange for accepting such a plan, which Sisi allegedly rejected,” he said. “While the accuracy of these claims is uncertain, their circulation in the Egyptian press likely aims to reaffirm Egypt’s long-standing stance on resettlement and rehabilitate Sisi’s image as a defender of Palestinian rights. It is worth recalling that [former president and Muslim Brotherhood member] Mohamed Morsi was accused of colluding with Hamas in a land-sale and resettlement deal in the Sinai after being deposed by Sisi in 2013.”
Read more Five hurdles to Donald Trump's Gaza-takeover plan
Although Egypt remains the only country in the world – alongside Israel – not affected by the Trump administration’s 90-day freeze on US foreign aid, the threat that the restoration of US financial assistance to Amman could be conditioned on the state’s acceptance of displaced Gazans has already begun to worry the Jordanian government.
Both countries are grappling with long-running – and worsening – economic challenges. Egypt narrowly avoided economic collapse last year with a last-minute financial infusion of more than $50 billion from the European Union, IMF, World Bank and the United Arab Emirates.
The cost has been high. As of 2024, the country had more than $152 billion worth of external debt, and has continued to sell off state assets in a bid to raise desperately needed foreign currency. And while Jordan’s economic outlook is less dire, the country has long been reliant on money from abroad to keep it afloat – official figures show that 70 percent of foreign aid went straight to budget support.
“The economic situation is indeed weak in Egypt – it is deep in debt with both old and new loans and it receives US aid annually ever since the signing of the Israeli peace, so this is a card both US administrations have played,” Fadl said.
But decades of US financial assistance to Amman and Cairo have not been entirely without mutual benefit. Some 3,000 US troops have been stationed in Jordan since the start of the civil war in neighbouring Syria. More recently, Jordan joined US allies in the region in intercepting a barrage of Iranian missiles launched at Israel in October in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah.
And the US has helped train and equip the Egyptian military for more than 30 years, weaning it off a reliance on Soviet armaments and setting it up as what Washington would come to see as an invaluable security partner for safeguarding US interests in a region that has long resented the US's military backing of Israel.
Nadl said that Cairo could lean on this long-standing security partnership to try to convince the US not to risk upsetting a status quo that had long served its interests.
“In terms of national security, there are real concerns around the impact of this on Egyptian territorial sovereignty in the future, since Israel covets and has previously occupied Egyptian land, and such a goal would seem more attainable following the weakening of Egypt if it allowed the Israeli plan,” she said. “There are also immediate concerns about the impact of absorbing Palestinian refugees, and with them not only the obligations of their protection and welfare, but also the potential for them to become a hub for Islamist oppositional activity in Egypt, given Hamas’s close ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, having grown from its Palestinian branch.”
Amman harbours similar fears about what backing down could cost it. The different waves of displaced Palestinians that have sought refuge in Jordan remain a deeply sensitive issue. Husseini said that the question had taken on an existential character in the eyes of Jordan’s government.
“The Gazans who arrived in the country during and following the 1967 war were not granted citizenship – contrary to those who arrived in the country in 1948 following the first Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said. “So it has been a claim of these Gazans that they should also, after all these decades, be granted citizenship. And it’s a point of contention between Gazans in the country, of which there are about 200,000, and the state. So there is already an issue in Jordan – so the Jordan state of course doesn’t want this issue of citizenship and the legal status of the Gazans in the country to fester.”
Just how far Trump was prepared to go to push his allies to back any plans for Gaza was difficult to know, Husseini said. But he stressed that Trump’s proposal seemed in keeping with the pro-Israel policies the president had pursued in his first term in office.
“During his first presidency, Trump was seen as quite a destabiliser – for instance, his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and his support for Israel’s settlement policy,” he said. “So this has been seen as a brutal extension of Trump’s vision of the future of the Middle East.”
Israel orders army to prepare for 'voluntary' departures from Gaza Strip
By: Paul MILLAR
Displaced Palestinian children sit on a sand mound overlooking tents set up amid destroyed buildings in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on February 6, 2025. © Bashar Taleb, AFPFormer real estate developer and current US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the US would administer the devastated Gaza Strip, displacing the more than 2 million Palestinians living there during the coastal territory’s reconstruction, has been met with horror across the Arab world. And nowhere more – with the obvious exception of Gaza – than in Jordan and Egypt, the two countries that Trump has promised will host this new generation of dispossessed Palestinians, regardless of their objections.
The Israelis certainly seem to be taking the idea seriously. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz on Thursday ordered the country’s armed forces to begin work on a plan to facilitate what he described as the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians living in Gaza.
Using force, or the threat of force, to displace a people living under military occupation is a war crime banned under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whose government depends on the support of far-right figures who have championed the mass emigration of Palestinians from Gaza and the return of Jewish settlers to the coastal territory for years, described Trump’s plan as a “remarkable” idea.
But Jalal Al Husseini, an associate researcher at the French Institute for the Near East in Amman, said that any plan involving the mass movement of Palestinians from Gaza would be met with fierce resistance across the Arab world.
“The Arab states have opposed any idea of any resettlement or de-Palestinisation of Palestine, especially the occupied Palestinian territories – which is also one of the aims of the far-right Israeli parties,” he said. “And that’s been one of the mainstays of the Arab states’ policies since 1967 – opposition to any large-scale displacement.”
Read more How serious is he? Trump's plan for Gaza
Nor, he said, was the idea of displacing Palestinians to Jordan a new one. Leaders from Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party have long called for Palestinians living in the occupied territories to find a new homeland across the Jordan River – leaving the land between the river and the sea to be annexed by the Israeli state.
“Since the late 70s, when the Likud won the elections and became the ruling party for the first time, they always championed this idea that eventually – and this is one of the very early claims of this movement – eventually, Jordan should be the alternative state or homeland of the Palestinians,” he said. “So any large-scale displacement of Palestinians to Jordan tends to support or validate this claim – that Jordan should be the alternative state of the Palestinians.” About half of Jordan’s population is believed to be of Palestinian origin.
Egypt has also been wary of receiving large numbers of people displaced by the fighting. In the early days of Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, the Biden administration reached out to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to try to convince the US-backed government to allow refugees to cross into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula via the Rafah Crossing. Cairo flatly rejected the idea, even bussing Egyptians from across the country to Rafah to lead state-sponsored demonstrations against Israel’s attempts to displace the people of Gaza.
Reem Abou-El-Fadl, a senior lecturer in comparative politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London, said that the Egyptian position was unlikely to have softened since then.
“I don’t think much has changed in their minds,” she said. “You can see this by the alarmist and alarmed tone of public media at the moment, just as it was in October 2023, where all the state-sponsored TV channels and talk shows are singing from the same hymn sheet about the threat to the Palestinian cause, the unity of Egyptian and Palestinian positions and their inalienable right to return.”
Read more Israel is committing ‘ethnic cleansing’ amid mass forced displacements in Gaza, HRW report says
Fadl said that Sisi, who seized power from democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi in a 2013 coup, has had to walk a thin line between suppressing attempts to organise support for the Palestinian cause and expressing public solidarity with Gaza in the face of Israel’s onslaught.
“When it comes to popular sentiment, which is in the majority viscerally opposed to the Israeli settler colonial project and vocally supportive of Palestinians, the regime stands to forfeit more of its already weak public support, or rather to force Egyptians out of their disgruntled silence, if it participates in a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza,” she said.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II this week also repeated his opposition to any attempts to displace the Palestinian people and annex their land. But despite their stark rejections of Trump’s plan, both countries remain deeply vulnerable to US pressure.
The US is Jordan’s single-largest aid provider, sending the Hashemite Kingdom $1.45 billion every year in bilateral foreign assistance. Egypt, for its part, received $1.3 billion in military aid in 2024. US military support for Cairo rose steeply after the country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, amounting to more than $50 billion in total since then. Egypt and Jordan are both in the top four recipients of US aid across the world – behind only Ukraine and Israel.
“The United States are one of the main donors of Jordan, both on the military side and in terms of socio-economic assistance as well,” Husseini said. “And this is one of the instruments that the US could use to talk Jordan into accepting a certain number of Gazans now. So it will be a showdown between the US and Jordan – and Egypt – around this issue.”
Gilad Wenig, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the US could already have begun to put its financial leverage over Egypt to use in the first days of the Gaza campaign.
“Egyptian reports suggest that the US offered financial incentives including debt relief to Egypt in exchange for accepting such a plan, which Sisi allegedly rejected,” he said. “While the accuracy of these claims is uncertain, their circulation in the Egyptian press likely aims to reaffirm Egypt’s long-standing stance on resettlement and rehabilitate Sisi’s image as a defender of Palestinian rights. It is worth recalling that [former president and Muslim Brotherhood member] Mohamed Morsi was accused of colluding with Hamas in a land-sale and resettlement deal in the Sinai after being deposed by Sisi in 2013.”
Read more Five hurdles to Donald Trump's Gaza-takeover plan
Although Egypt remains the only country in the world – alongside Israel – not affected by the Trump administration’s 90-day freeze on US foreign aid, the threat that the restoration of US financial assistance to Amman could be conditioned on the state’s acceptance of displaced Gazans has already begun to worry the Jordanian government.
Both countries are grappling with long-running – and worsening – economic challenges. Egypt narrowly avoided economic collapse last year with a last-minute financial infusion of more than $50 billion from the European Union, IMF, World Bank and the United Arab Emirates.
The cost has been high. As of 2024, the country had more than $152 billion worth of external debt, and has continued to sell off state assets in a bid to raise desperately needed foreign currency. And while Jordan’s economic outlook is less dire, the country has long been reliant on money from abroad to keep it afloat – official figures show that 70 percent of foreign aid went straight to budget support.
“The economic situation is indeed weak in Egypt – it is deep in debt with both old and new loans and it receives US aid annually ever since the signing of the Israeli peace, so this is a card both US administrations have played,” Fadl said.
But decades of US financial assistance to Amman and Cairo have not been entirely without mutual benefit. Some 3,000 US troops have been stationed in Jordan since the start of the civil war in neighbouring Syria. More recently, Jordan joined US allies in the region in intercepting a barrage of Iranian missiles launched at Israel in October in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah.
And the US has helped train and equip the Egyptian military for more than 30 years, weaning it off a reliance on Soviet armaments and setting it up as what Washington would come to see as an invaluable security partner for safeguarding US interests in a region that has long resented the US's military backing of Israel.
Nadl said that Cairo could lean on this long-standing security partnership to try to convince the US not to risk upsetting a status quo that had long served its interests.
“In terms of national security, there are real concerns around the impact of this on Egyptian territorial sovereignty in the future, since Israel covets and has previously occupied Egyptian land, and such a goal would seem more attainable following the weakening of Egypt if it allowed the Israeli plan,” she said. “There are also immediate concerns about the impact of absorbing Palestinian refugees, and with them not only the obligations of their protection and welfare, but also the potential for them to become a hub for Islamist oppositional activity in Egypt, given Hamas’s close ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, having grown from its Palestinian branch.”
Amman harbours similar fears about what backing down could cost it. The different waves of displaced Palestinians that have sought refuge in Jordan remain a deeply sensitive issue. Husseini said that the question had taken on an existential character in the eyes of Jordan’s government.
“The Gazans who arrived in the country during and following the 1967 war were not granted citizenship – contrary to those who arrived in the country in 1948 following the first Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said. “So it has been a claim of these Gazans that they should also, after all these decades, be granted citizenship. And it’s a point of contention between Gazans in the country, of which there are about 200,000, and the state. So there is already an issue in Jordan – so the Jordan state of course doesn’t want this issue of citizenship and the legal status of the Gazans in the country to fester.”
Just how far Trump was prepared to go to push his allies to back any plans for Gaza was difficult to know, Husseini said. But he stressed that Trump’s proposal seemed in keeping with the pro-Israel policies the president had pursued in his first term in office.
“During his first presidency, Trump was seen as quite a destabiliser – for instance, his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and his support for Israel’s settlement policy,” he said. “So this has been seen as a brutal extension of Trump’s vision of the future of the Middle East.”
Israel orders army to prepare for 'voluntary' departures from Gaza Strip
Israel's defence minister instructed the military on Thursday to prepare for "voluntary" departures from Gaza, after US President Donald Trump doubled down on his proposal to take over control of the Gaza Strip and move out Palestinians from the territory.
Issued on: 06/02/2025
FRANCE24
By: NEWS WIRES
02:00
Much of the Gaza Strip was levelled by the 15-month Israel-Hamas war. © Omar Al-Qattaa, AFP
Israel's defence minister ordered the army on Thursday to prepare for "voluntary" departures from Gaza, after US President Donald Trump proposed moving Palestinians out of the territory.
The idea sparked uproar from leaders in the Middle East and beyond, and the Trump administration appeared to walk back some of the suggestions.
Hours later, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said he had instructed the military to formulate a plan for Palestinians to leave Gaza, which has been ravaged by more than a year of war.
"I have instructed the IDF (military) to prepare a plan to enable voluntary departure for Gaza residents," Katz said, adding they could go "to any country willing to accept them".
Trump announced his proposal to audible gasps on Tuesday at a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to meet him at the White House since his inauguration.
The United Nations warned any forced displacement of Palestinians would be "tantamount to ethnic cleansing".
Trump insisted "everybody loves" the plan, saying it would involve the United States taking over Gaza, though he offered few details on how more than two million Palestinians would be removed.
His administration later appeared to backtrack, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying any transfer of Gazans would be temporary.
Trump doubled down on his proposal on Thursday, however.
"The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting," he said on his Truth Social network.
"No soldiers by the US would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!"
Hamas's spokesman condemned Trump's statements as "absolutely unacceptable".
"Trump's remarks about Washington taking control of Gaza amount to an open declaration of intent to occupy the territory," Hazem Qassem said.
"Gaza is for its people and they will not leave.
"We call for the convening of an emergency Arab summit to confront the displacement project."
'Greatest friend'
Netanyahu, speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, called the proposal "remarkable" and hailed Trump as Israel's "greatest friend".
Many Palestinians have vowed to stay in Gaza © Omar Al-Qattaa, AFP
"I think it should be really pursued, examined, pursued and done, because I think it will create a different future for everyone."
Katz said Trump's plan "could create broad opportunities for Gaza residents who wish to leave, help them integrate optimally in host countries, and also facilitate the advancement of reconstruction programs for a demilitarised, threat-free Gaza".
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich -- who has repeatedly expressed support for Trump's proposal to relocate Gazans, and who vowed Wednesday to "definitively bury" the idea of a Palestinian state -- said he welcomed Katz's move.
Much of Gaza has been levelled by the war sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the deadliest in the country's history, but Palestinians residing in the coastal territory have vowed not to leave.
For them, any attempt to push them out of Gaza recalls the "Nakba", or "catastrophe" -- the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel's creation in 1948.
"They can do whatever they want, but we will remain steadfast in our homeland," said 41-year-old Gazan Ahmed Halasa.
Israelis in Jerusalem largely welcomed Trump's proposal, though some doubted it could be carried out.
"I really like what he said, but in my wildest dreams... it's hard for me to believe it will happen, but who knows," said 65-year-old Refael.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump wanted Palestinians to only be "temporarily relocated" out of Gaza.
"It's not a liveable place for any human being," she said.
Trump, who also suggested he might visit Gaza, implied it would not be rebuilt for Palestinians.
"I think it should be really pursued, examined, pursued and done, because I think it will create a different future for everyone."
Katz said Trump's plan "could create broad opportunities for Gaza residents who wish to leave, help them integrate optimally in host countries, and also facilitate the advancement of reconstruction programs for a demilitarised, threat-free Gaza".
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich -- who has repeatedly expressed support for Trump's proposal to relocate Gazans, and who vowed Wednesday to "definitively bury" the idea of a Palestinian state -- said he welcomed Katz's move.
Much of Gaza has been levelled by the war sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the deadliest in the country's history, but Palestinians residing in the coastal territory have vowed not to leave.
For them, any attempt to push them out of Gaza recalls the "Nakba", or "catastrophe" -- the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel's creation in 1948.
"They can do whatever they want, but we will remain steadfast in our homeland," said 41-year-old Gazan Ahmed Halasa.
Israelis in Jerusalem largely welcomed Trump's proposal, though some doubted it could be carried out.
"I really like what he said, but in my wildest dreams... it's hard for me to believe it will happen, but who knows," said 65-year-old Refael.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump wanted Palestinians to only be "temporarily relocated" out of Gaza.
"It's not a liveable place for any human being," she said.
Trump, who also suggested he might visit Gaza, implied it would not be rebuilt for Palestinians.
'Serious violation'
Even before Tuesday's announcements, Trump had suggested residents of Gaza should move to Egypt and Jordan, both of which have flatly rejected any resettlement of Palestinians on their territory.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas rejected the proposal, calling it a "serious violation" of international law and insisting that "legitimate Palestinian rights are not negotiable".
Portraits of Shiri Bibas and her children Ariel and Kfir, all Israeli hostages in Gaza, at a rally outside the prime minister's office in Jerusalem © Menahem Kahana, AFP
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres emphasised "the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people... to simply live as human beings in their own land".
His spokesman Stephane Dujarric, when asked about Trump's plan, said: "Any forced displacement of people is tantamount to ethnic cleansing."
Israel's military offensive in response to Hamas's attack has left much of Gaza in ruins, including schools, hospitals and most civil infrastructure.
Human Rights Watch said the destruction of Gaza "reflects a calculated Israeli policy to make parts of the strip unliveable".
Trump's plan "would move the US from being complicit in war crimes to direct perpetration of atrocities", said HRW regional director Lama Fakih.
In a bid to address the dire humanitarian situation, aid has been rushed into the territory since a fragile ceasefire took effect on January 19.
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said Thursday that more than 10,000 aid trucks had crossed into Gaza since the truce went into effect, calling it "a massive surge".
(AFP)
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres emphasised "the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people... to simply live as human beings in their own land".
His spokesman Stephane Dujarric, when asked about Trump's plan, said: "Any forced displacement of people is tantamount to ethnic cleansing."
Israel's military offensive in response to Hamas's attack has left much of Gaza in ruins, including schools, hospitals and most civil infrastructure.
Human Rights Watch said the destruction of Gaza "reflects a calculated Israeli policy to make parts of the strip unliveable".
Trump's plan "would move the US from being complicit in war crimes to direct perpetration of atrocities", said HRW regional director Lama Fakih.
In a bid to address the dire humanitarian situation, aid has been rushed into the territory since a fragile ceasefire took effect on January 19.
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said Thursday that more than 10,000 aid trucks had crossed into Gaza since the truce went into effect, calling it "a massive surge".
(AFP)
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