Cairo (AP) – The powerful Arab nations rejected us on Saturday President Donald Trump’s suggestion To move the Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League published a joint declaration rejecting any plan to get the Palestinians out of their territories in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Trump launched the idea last month, saying that he would urge the leaders of Jordan and Egypt to welcome the now homeless population of Gaza, so that “we clean it up”. He added that the resettlement of the major part of the Gaza population of 2.3 million could be temporary or in the long term. Some Israeli officials had increased the idea of transfer at the start of the war.
“It is literally a demolition site at the moment,” said Trump, referring to the vast destruction caused by the War of Israel with 15 months with Hamas, now a break by a fragile ceasefire.
The Arabic declaration warned that such plans “threaten the stability of the region, the risk of expanding the conflict and undergoing the prospects of peace and coexistence between its peoples”.
The declaration follows a meeting in Cairo of the best diplomats of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as Hussein Al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official who serves as a main connection with Israel and chief of the Ahmed Aboul-Gheit Arabic League.
They said they can’t wait to work with the Trump administration to “make a just and complete peace in the Middle East, based on the two-state solution,” the statement.
They called for the international community to help “plan and implement” a complete reconstruction plan for Gaza to guarantee that the Palestinians remain on their land.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sissi rejected Trump’s suggestion at a press conference last week, saying that he transfers Palestinians “can never be tolerated or authorized.”
“The solution to this problem is the two -state solution. It is the creation of a Palestinian state, “he said. “The solution is not to remove the Palestinian people from their place. No.”
Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi also said that his country’s opposition to Trump’s idea was “firm and unshakeable”.
Egypt and Jordan, as well as the Palestinians, fear that Israel will allow them to return to Gaza once they left. Egypt and Jordan also fear the impact of such an influx of refugees on their economies in difficulty as well as the stability of their governments.
Jordan already houses more than 2 million Palestinians. Egypt warned against the implications in terms of security for the transfer of a large number of Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula in Egypt, bordering Gaza.
The two countries were the first to make peace with Israel, but they support the creation of a Palestinian state in occupied West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem-Est, territories that Israel captured in the war of the Middle East of 1967.
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