By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Hatem Khaled
CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) – Gazans criticised U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the Gaza Strip and resettle Palestinians elsewhere, vowing to never leave the ruins of their homes in the coastal enclave that Trump wants to turn into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.
“Trump can go to hell, with his ideas, with his money, and with his beliefs. We are going nowhere. We are not some of his assets,” said Samir Abu Basel in Gaza City via a chat app.
“If he wants to resolve this conflict he should take the Israelis and put them in one of the states (in America). They are the strangers, not the Palestinians. We are the owners of the land,” said the father of five, who has been displaced from his house near Jabalia on Gaza’s northern edge.
Trump said he envisioned building a resort where international communities could live after over 15 months of Israeli bombardment devastated the tiny coastal enclave and killed more than 47,000 people, by Palestinian tallies.
Gaza residents said after war and bombs had failed to eject them from Gaza, Trump would not succeed in doing so.
“He spoke with much arrogance…he can test us, and soon he will find out his fantasies don’t work with us,” said Abu Basel.
As fighting raged in the Gaza war, Palestinians feared they would suffer another “Nakba,” or catastrophe, the time when hundreds of thousands were dispossessed of their homes in the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Now they fear another round of displacement.
“We will not leave our areas, we will not allow a second Nakba. We have brought our kids up teaching them that they can’t leave their home and they can’t allow a second Nakba,” Um Tamer Jamal, a 65-year-old mother of six, told Reuters via a chat app.
“(Trump) is crazy. We didn’t leave Gaza under the bombardment and the starvation, how does he intend to eject us? We are going nowhere,” she said from Gaza City.
PALESTINIAN RIVALS UNITE
The shock move from Trump, a former New York property developer, was swiftly condemned by international powers as well as Palestinian leaders.
The rival Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamist group Hamas united in rejecting what they said was a plan to seize the Mediterranean coastal territory and expel Palestinians from their homeland.
Abbas said the Palestinians would not relinquish “their land, rights, and sacred sites, and that the Gaza Strip is an integral part of the land of the State of Palestine, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior official of Hamas, which ruled the Gaza Strip before fighting Israel in a brutal war there, said Trump’s statement about taking over the enclave was “ridiculous and absurd”.
“Any ideas of this kind are capable of igniting the region,” he told Reuters, saying Hamas remains committed to the ceasefire accord with Israel and negotiating its next phase.
The initial six-week truce, agreed with Egyptian and Qatari mediators and backed by the U.S., has remained largely intact but prospects for a durable settlement are unclear.
In Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, families sitting near the rubble of a destroyed building said they were waiting for their homes to be rebuilt, not to be expelled from them.
Addressing President Trump, Ahmed Shahin said: “You helped Israel in the first place in this destruction that we can see here. Therefore, you have to rebuild for us while we are on this land. You can’t say we have to leave for you to rebuild.”
(Writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi. Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Hatem Khaled. Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta; Editing by Ros Russell)
