President Donald Trump on Monday renewed his call to transfer to safer locales those Palestinians who wish to leave the Gaza Strip.
"For years and years, all I hear about is killing and Hamas and problems," he said during a press gathering in the Oval Office on Monday together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"And if you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries, and you have plenty of countries that will do that … you really have a freedom zone … a zone where people aren't going to be killed every day," he added.
The president first announced his Gaza relocation plan during a press conference with Netanyahu in February.
Netanyahu, who has endorsed the plan, said on Monday that "what the president is talking about is: give people a choice. Gazans were closed in. Every other place, including arenas of battle, whether it's Ukraine or Syria, or any other place, people could leave. What is wrong with giving people a choice? … Enabling the people of Gaza to really make a choice to go wherever they want?"
He noted that Gaza's reconstruction would take years.
A senior Israeli diplomatic source told JNS on April 4 that polls showed that many Palestinians in Gaza want to leave.
"Even before Israel restarted military action, 60% said they wanted to leave — 40% of those don't want to come back, and another 20% want to go but with the option to return. That's more than 1 million people who say they want to leave," said the source.
Israelis support the president's proposal, according to polls.
The sticking point has appeared to be finding partner countries willing to take Gazans in. However, Netanyahu said on Monday that "countries are responding to [Trump's] vision. We're working on it. I hope we'll have good news for you."
Though he would not name the countries, Danny Danon, who returned to serve as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations in 2024, having previously held the post from 2015 to 2020, said in December 2023 that South American and African countries had expressed interest in taking in Palestinians in exchange for financial remuneration.
Arab countries should lend a hand, too, as they "have an obligation to help the Palestinians. Let them help instead of giving inflammatory speeches," said Danon.
Arab countries have so far refused to lend a hand to Trump's proposal, instead offering alternative reconstruction plans in which Gazans would stay in place.
U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, in an interview with Tucker Carlson in March, appeared to reject such reconstruction plans as unrealistic.
"I think it's really important that when you're making these decisions that you level-set the facts," he said, pointing out that the conditions in the Strip are far too dangerous to live in.
"How do we put people back in a battle zone where there are munitions all over the field? Or where there are these latent conditions so that a kid can fall into a hole and go 40, 50, 60 feet down, and you'd never know that he was there," he added.
"Who would do such a thing? If we had buildings and those conditions in New York, there would be yellow tape all around it and no one would be allowed in," said Witkoff, estimating it would take 15 to 20 years to rebuild Gaza.
He shared the president's view that past policy prescriptions for Gaza hadn't worked, perpetuating a cycle of war, rebuilding and more war. It didn't make "any sense," he said, adding, "The president began to say, ‘Maybe we need to think about it in a different way.'"
Republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate