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Israel’s defence minister has ordered the military to prepare plans to allow Palestinians “who wish to leave” Gaza to exit, after Donald Trump suggested the US take over the territory and resettle its residents in other countries.
Israel Katz said the military plan would include options to leave via land, air and sea. “The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration,” he said in a statement on X, although it was clear that the journeys would only be in one direction.
Before the war, Israel’s tight controls on movement in and out of the strip made it difficult for Palestinians to travel internationally. Restrictions got even tighter after the conflict began, and after Israeli troops began operating near the Rafah crossing last May it was impossible for Palestinians to leave.
An agreement to allow medical evacuations from Gaza was part of the ceasefire deal, and the first group of sick children left on Saturday, although two died before they could be taken out and others had become too sick to move.
Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” led to international outrage, including a warning from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, that “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing”.
Forced or coerced displacement is a crime against humanity, illegal under the Geneva conventions, to which Israel and the US are signatories.
In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said Israel would turn the Gaza Strip over to the US after the fighting ended and that no US soldiers would be needed there.
“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting. The Palestinians … would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region,” Trump said in a post building on his controversial comments about Gaza’s future this week. “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed!”
Palestinians in Gaza responded to Trump’s plans with anger and disbelief, and said they would reject any attempt to force them out.
Many have traumatic family memories of the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, in which about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled after the creation of Israel, a history that means they are determined to resist further displacement.
Katz also demanded that countries including Spain, Norway and Ireland allow Palestinians from Gaza to “enter their territory”.
Last year the three countries formally recognised a Palestinian state, in a move aimed at supporting a two-state solution. Their decision prompted fury in Israel, which ordered back its ambassadors and accused the trio of rewarding terrorism.
Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, was quick to reject the demand. Palestinians who need support including urgent medical treatment would be welcomed in Spain, but “Gaza is the land of the people of Gaza”, he said in a radio interview. “It should be part of a future Palestinian state.”
Inside Israel the far right embraced Trump’s comments as vindication of their long-term call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and Jewish settlement.
The legislator Limor Son Har-Melech said Trump was hailed as “original and creative” for laying out plans that had led her party leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to be labelled “fascist, extremist, delusional”.
In a radio interview she described a vision of Jewish Israeli children playing in Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. Her party would only return to the coalition government, which it left over opposition to the ceasefire deal, when “we see buses coming out” of Gaza carrying its Palestinian residents, she added.
