US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that “the Gaza thing has never worked” as he and top advisers made the case that a three-to-five-year timeline for reconstruction of the war-torn territory, as laid out in a temporary truce agreement, is not viable.
Mr Trump renewed his call to Arab nations to relocate displaced Palestinians as he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, saying “you can’t live in Gaza right now, you need another location”.
“The Gaza thing has never worked,” Mr Trump told reporters.
Egypt and Jordan, as well as other Arab nations, have flatly rejected calls by Mr Trump to relocate the territory’s 2.3 million Palestinians during post-war rebuilding of the territory.
But senior administration officials continue to press the case for relocation of Palestinians on humanitarian grounds.
“To me, it is unfair to explain to Palestinians that they might be back in five years,” Mr Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, told reporters.
“That’s just preposterous.”
The Israeli prime minister is facing competing pressure from his right-wing coalition to end a temporary truce against Hamas militants in Gaza and from war-weary Israelis who want the remaining hostages home and for the 15-month conflict to end.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, remains guarded about the long-term prospects for the truce, even as he takes credit for pressuring Hamas and Israel into the hostage and ceasefire agreement that came into effect the day before he returned to office last month.
“I have no guarantees that the peace is going to hold,” Mr Trump told reporters on Monday.
The leaders’ talks are expected to touch on a long-sought Israel-Saudi Arabia normalisation deal and concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme, but hammering out the second phase of the hostage deal will be at the top of the agenda.
