President Trump insisted Tuesday that the United States had the authority to “take” Gaza and that other countries in the region would absorb the Palestinians who currently live there, speaking as he sat beside Jordan’s king in the Oval Office.
“We will have Gaza,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it.”
The remarks — made at an impromptu gaggle with reporters called in abruptly at the start of the bilateral meeting between the two leaders — represented a new form of pressure on King Abdullah II, who sought to praise Mr. Trump as a force for peace in the region while avoiding comment on a barely formed proposal that the president has repeatedly floated in the past week.
Their meeting, along with Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan, came a week after Mr. Trump declared that he wanted the U.S. to seize control of Gaza and wanted Jordan and Egypt to resettle the roughly two million Palestinians who would be displaced.
Both Jordan and Egypt rejected the idea when Mr. Trump raised it last week at a news conference with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. But on Tuesday, King Abdullah largely demurred when asked by reporters about the prospect of forcibly displacing Gazans to allow the United States to take over the territory.
Rather than push back on Mr. Trump’s proposal, King Abdullah said the two nations should consult with other Arab nations, including Egypt.
“I think the point is, how do we make this work in a way that is good for everybody,” King Abdullah said. “Obviously we have to look at the best interests of the United States, of the people in the region, especially to my people of Jordan.”
The meeting with King Abdullah amounted to not only a pivotal moment for a key ally in the Middle East but more broadly for the future of Gaza and the roughly two million Palestinians who call it home.
The talks came as the cease-fire agreement in the war in the Gaza Strip appeared to be at risk of breaking. Mr. Netanyahu warned Hamas on Tuesday that if hostages were not released by noon on Saturday, then Israeli troops would resume “intense fighting.” His statement echoed an ultimatum Mr. Trump issued on Monday evening and again on Tuesday, that Hamas would need to release all remaining hostages by Saturday at midday.
“They either have them out by Saturday at 12 o’clock or all bets are off,” Mr. Trump said.
Hamas has accused Israel of breaking a promise to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, a claim that three Israeli officials and two mediators said were accurate. The Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, however, has said that Hamas’s claims are “completely false accusations.”
Mr. Trump in recent days has dug in on his improbable proposal to permanently resettle most Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt, while the United States would be handed control of the territory by Israel and then redevelop it into a hub for jobs and tourism. Mr. Trump has privately been talking about the notion of the United States taking control of Gaza for several weeks, according to multiple people who have spoken with him.
Officials in both Jordan and Egypt have rejected the forced displacement of Gazans, which scholars have said would amount to a violation of international law and ethnic cleansing. Mr. Trump, however, ramped up pressure on Egypt and Jordan on the eve of King Abdullah’s visit when he said he could cut aid to Jordan unless it took in Palestinians.
American aid to Jordan, including military aid, is currently frozen as part of Mr. Trump’s halt to foreign assistance across the globe. Still, King Abdullah now faces the difficult task of trying to protect the more than $1.5 billion in foreign aid Jordan receives from the United States while also trying to get Mr. Trump to back off his demands for the mass removal of Palestinians.
More than half of King Abdullah’s 12 million subjects are of Palestinian descent. Jordan is already home to approximately 700,000 refugees, most of them Syrians who fled from that country’s civil war. The monarchy is concerned that accepting an influx of another roughly two million refugees could inflame tensions between citizens of Palestinian descent and those who are not, analysts say.
Jordan’s parliament just last week introduced a bill that would ban the resettlement of Palestinians in the country.
“During his visit, King Abdullah will likely warn Trump that his resettlement idea will destabilize the Middle East, jeopardize Jordan’s peace with Israel and even threaten the kingdom’s stability,” said Ahmad Sharawi, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research institute.
Mr. Abdullah could try to convince Mr. Trump that his hope to move Palestinians out of Gaza would complicate his administration’s broader efforts to get Saudi Arabia to join Mr. Trump’s 2020 Abraham Accords, which established formal ties between Israel and four Arab countries.
