Jordan And Egypt Unite Against Trump’s Vision For Gaza

The leaders of Jordan and Egypt railed against President Donald Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza in parallel statements Wednesday — just a day after Trump hosted the Jordanian monarch at the White House.

Speaking in a phone call, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan's King Abdullah II stressed their countries’ “shared position” on reconstructing Gaza and allowing aid to flow into the strip “without displacing the Palestinians from their land,” Jordan’s monarchy said in a statement.

“The two leaders acknowledged President Trump’s leadership in working towards the long-awaited goal of establishing a Palestinian state along the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital,” Egypt’s presidency added in its own statement.

Trump said last week that the U.S. could take over Gaza, expel its two million Palestinians to neighboring countries and redevelop the land as the “the Riviera of the Middle East.” He made the stunning proposal during a press conference at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has repeatedly doubled down on it.

The Palestinians could be resettled into “far safer and more beautiful communities,” fitted with “new and modern homes,” Trump argued in a post on Truth Social — though administration officials have said they have not drafted a detailed plan to do so.

Trump’s pitch was met with fierce resistance from Arab nations, which have long opposed taking in massive numbers of Palestinian refugees from Gaza, even as Israel bombarded the sealed-off enclave, for fear it could destabilize their own countries and threaten peace in the region.

Jordan already has a massive, mostly naturalized Palestinian population, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to the country in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Jordan’s king, who met with Trump at the White House on Tuesday, would not publicly comment on whether he supported a U.S. takeover of Gaza and broader resettlement, saying he had to confer with Egypt and other Arab nations first, but said Amman would accept 2,000 sick Palestinian children from Gaza.

Trump called the announcement a “beautiful gesture” and backed away from his earlier threats to withhold U.S. aid from Jordan unless it takes in more Palestinian refugees.