US President Donald Trump has revealed an extremely controversial plan for the Middle East which involves moving more than a million Palestinians out of Gaza and into Jordan and Egypt.
Attacks on the territory by Israel have displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population, many of them multiple times, through a combination of forced evacuation orders and relentless airstrikes.
But the idea will be immediately controversial, stoking Arab fears of a plot to give Palestinian land to Israeli settlers and invoking memories of the displacement in 1948, also known as the Nakba.
This involved the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes by Israeli forces, along with the destruction of Arab villages. Today 5.9 million Palestinians are registered as refugees.
Speaking to reporters on board presidential jet Air Force One Trump said: ‘You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.

The newly inaugurated president, now serving a second non-consecutive term described a phone call with Jordan’s King Abdullah II earlier.
He said he asked the Jordanian leader to take in more Palestinian refugees from a region mired in war saying: ‘I’d love for you to take on more, cause I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.’
‘It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.’
Later on Sunday, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said that Amman’s ‘position is that the two-state solution is the way to achieve peace’.’
He stressed that Jordan’s ‘rejection of displacement is fixed and unchangeable’ in an apparent veiled response to Trump.
Trump’s Q&A
During a 20-minute question and answer session on the presidential jet with his travelling press pool, Trump stated his views on the war-torn enclave: ‘You know over the centuries it’s had many, many conflicts. And I don’t know, something has to happen.
‘It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.’

Trump said he will make the same request to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi when they next talk.
‘I’d like Egypt to take people,’ he said. ‘And I’d like Jordan to take people.’
Trump said it might be a temporary state of affairs or it could be longer term. But either way the plan will likely be hard to sell to Israel’s Arab neighbours who are reluctant to take on more refugees, and hard to sell to the people of Gaza, who fear they would never be able to return.
The plans have quickly attracted criticism. Abdullah Al-Arian, associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, said Israeli officials had indicated very early on in the course of the war to ‘ethnically cleanse’ as much of the Palestinian territory as possible.
‘That plan failed for multiple reasons, one of which is that Arab leaders who were approached at that point in time simply declined to take on an additional Palestinian refugee population, in part because it was politically unviable in Egypt in particular,’ he said.
Al-Arian said Palestinians themselves would not be interested in such a proposal by Trump.
‘They know all too well what it means to leave their home and what the status of Palestinian refugees has looked like for the past 70 years,’ he said