US envoy: no plan to force Palestinians out of Gaza

The US ambassador to Israel said Saturday there was no plan underway to force Palestinians out of Gaza, after Israeli ministers laid out ideas on how to expel the war-battered territory’s two million people.”

I can tell you categorially there is no plan of the Israelis to displace people out of Gaza against their will,” Ambassador Mike Huckabee told reporters as he visited Palestinian-Americans in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir laid out a plan on Thursday that aims to see the departure of 250,000 Palestinians from Gaza in the first year, followed by the rest of the roughly two million residents over the following six years.

His remarks came a day after Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel was ready to remove Palestinians from Gaza by sea and land but was waiting for the United States, which he said was discussing where the population would go.

Katz, without citing his source, said 80 percent of people in Gaza wanted to leave but that Hamas was preventing them.

Huckabee said that President Donald Trump’s administration which has made hostility to international migration a central priority wanted to give Palestinians the option to leave by choice.”

There is an open-mindedness if people wish to leave, that they should have the right to leave,” Huckabee said, calling it a “disgrace” to “incarcerate” Palestinians inside Gaza.

“Nobody is suggesting there would be forced displacement — the Israelis are not, the Americans are not. I know of no one who supports that,” he said.

Forced displacement of a civilian population from occupied territory is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Virtually the entire population of Gaza has already been displaced internally by Israel’s military offensive following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Since the war, some far-right Israeli politicians have spoken of bringing settlers back to the Gaza Strip, where Israel dismantled settlements in 2005 as part of a unilateral plan to disengage from the densely populated region.

The remarks on displacement come in the run-up to the October 27 elections, in which polls show a tight race for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has brought once shunned far-right figures into his cabinet.

US President Donald Trump stunned the world early in his second term by proposing to displace all Palestinians at least temporarily from Gaza and turn the rubble-strewn Mediterranean territory into a luxury resort.

He backtracked after pushback from countries including Egypt, the only country other than Israel to border Gaza.