Trump's Gaza 'clean out' is blatant violation of international law, say experts
The plan proposed by US President Donald Trump on Sunday to "just clean out" Gaza, with Egypt and Jordan taking in displaced Palestinians, is a clear breach of international law, experts told Middle East Eye.
The deportation or forcible transfer of a civilian population in whole or part is a war crime under international humanitarian law. When committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, it amounts to a crime against humanity, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), this rule amounts to customary international law, which is binding on all states that have not persistently objected to it.
Ardi Imseis, professor of International Law at Queen's University and a former UN official, said that, "President Trump’s desire to ‘relocate’ Palestinians en masse from the occupied Gaza Strip is as illegal as it is wishful."
"Under international humanitarian law and international criminal law, individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive," he told Middle East Eye.
"According to the ICRC, the rationale behind this prohibition was to forestall the occupying power from usurping and colonising occupied territory through ethnic cleansing, as was done by Nazi Germany in certain territories it occupied during World War Two."
Likewise, Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said: "The prohibition on displacement of civilians as a result of war dates back to the American civil war and is considered a well established principle of the laws of war."
Illegal and irresponsible
A number of officials in Israel supported Trump's proposal, including far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who welcomed the idea as "out-of-the-box thinking" to enable Palestinians to "establish new and good lives in other places.”
But the UN's special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, denounced the statements by both Trump and Smotrich, saying: "Ethnic cleansing is anything but an 'out-of the box' thinking, no matter how one packages it. It is illegal, immoral and irresponsible."
Asked about Trump's remarks, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas on Monday said the European Union supports the two-state solution, but refrained from directly citing Trump's statement.
"Gaza and the people of Gaza have suffered a lot. I think both the Palestinians as well as the Israelis deserve peace and that is why we really need to move on from the ceasefire to a more permanent peace," she said.
'President Trump’s desire to ‘relocate’ Palestinians en masse from the occupied Gaza Strip is as illegal as it is wishful'
- Professor Ardi Imseis, Queens University
She added that the EU is ready to redeploy its mission to the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, to facilitate the transport of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
For Palestinians, the call for mass displacement is reminiscent of their ethnic cleansing during the creation of Israel in 1948, known as the Nakba, when 750,000 were forced from their homes and out into neighbouring countries.
Israeli settlers and far-right officials have already advocated plans for forcibly displacing Palestinians from vast swaths of Gaza and replacing them with Israeli settlers.
Most of northern Gaza's 1.1 million residents were forced south by Israeli expulsion orders when the war broke out 15 months ago.
Yet, the latest ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas has brought these plans to a halt, at least temporarily.
On Monday, Palestinians started to return to their homes in the north, most of which have been reduced to rubble by Israel's bombardment.
Imseis, who is the author of The UN and the Question of Palestine, said Trump's idea is "wishful thinking" because the suggestion has been advocated for decades, in particular since the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel's ensuing war on Gaza.
"Anyone with even a grade school knowledge of the Palestine question will know that the Palestinian people would never accept being ethnically cleansed from their land given their lived history," he told MEE.
"Nor would any Arab state accept this, especially Egypt and Jordan."
Egypt and Jordan push back
Israel's onslaught on Gaza has already displaced more than 90 percent of the Palestinian enclave's 2.4 million population and killed over 47,000 people.
In his comments to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said he had spoken to Jordan's King Abdullah II and planned on talking to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi about moving Palestinians out of the enclave.
"I'd like Egypt to take people. And I'd like Jordan to take people," Trump said.
"You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," Trump added, in reference to Gaza.
Trump said that Gaza’s residents could be relocated “temporarily or could be long term”.
Read More »“It is literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there,” he said.
“So, I would rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
Egypt and Jordan, the only two Arab states neighbouring occupied Palestine, have rejected the proposal. Cairo and Amman have long advocated a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and consistently rejected the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi on Sunday said his government's opposition to the forced displacement of Palestinians remains unchanged.
Egypt's foreign ministry also reiterated the same opinion, saying it rejects the displacement of Palestinians "whether temporarily or permanently", while Sisi has repeatedly opposed proposals for displacing Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula.
Jordan is home to 2.3 Palestinian refugees, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, while Egypt hosts tens of thousands.
Today, there are 5.8 million registered Palestinian refugees living in dozens of camps in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Some 80 percent of the Gaza population are refugees or descendants of refugees displaced since the Nakba of 1948, when Israel captured 78 percent of historic Palestine.
"If any of these people leave the occupied Gaza Strip, it ought to be to exercise their right to return, with appropriate restitution and compensation, to their lands in what is now Israel, as required by international law," said Imseis.
A fragile ceasefire agreement has been in place since 19 January. Israel and Hamas completed their second captives-prisoners exchange on Saturday, as Hamas released four Israeli women soldiers in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
