Palestinians Reject Trump’s Plan to Relocate Them Outside of Gaza

“When a city is destroyed, its people return to it to rebuild it; they do not leave it,” said one resident.

Tuesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that the U.S. would take over Gaza and permanently relocate its Palestinian residents to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man responsible for Gaza’s devastation, sat beside him and grinned as Trump answered a reporter about whether Palestinians would be allowed to return: “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”

But after 15 months of displacement, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have already made their long-awaited return to their homes in northern Gaza. Most of them had only rubble to go back to, but they insisted on making the long trek on foot, many of them vowing never to leave again. Residents arriving in the north told Mondoweiss they were fully aware that barely any structure remained intact in northern Gaza and expected to enter into a new chapter of suffering. They also said that they would not trade what remained of their homes for anything Trump had to offer.

“The clear goal of this war is to make as many Palestinians as possible in Gaza homeless, because this destruction is deliberate and planned,” Alaa Subaih, a resident of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, told Mondoweiss. “The aim is to make us suffer from lack of shelter so that we leave our country and move.”

In direct response to Trump’s statements Subaih said, “Even if his land is hell, it is my land. I do not want to live elsewhere,” he said. “I returned to revive and rebuild it.”

“If the American president wants to help Israel, the best solution for him is to take all the Israelis to his country, America, not to transfer the owners of the land. We are attached to our land and will not go to any other country. Our country, Palestine, is the most beautiful country on earth,” Subaih added.

“They Returned Us to Gaza, But They Did Not Return Gaza to Us”

In al-Shuja’iyya, residents are cut off from any electricity, water, sewage, or internet lines. Most families have to walk over half a kilometer carrying empty plastic gallons so that they can fill them up at the nearest water supply point, as water trucks cannot reach most areas that have not been cleared of rubble.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, which previously announced that the Gaza Strip was classified as a disaster area, the Israeli occupation is delaying the implementation of the agreed-upon stipulations of the ceasefire that would see the influx of aid and humanitarian relief to Gaza as part of the ongoing first phase of the ceasefire agreement.

The statement also provided an overview of the scale of the destruction Israel caused in Gaza over the past 15 months, stating that 450,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed — 170,000 of them were “completely destroyed,” 80,000 were “severely damaged,” and 200,000 were “partially damaged.”

“This is not a livable city,” Subaih said after spending nearly a week camped out beside the destroyed remains of his house. “It’s just heaps upon heaps of rubble. We can’t get any basic necessities; there is no water, no housing, it’s as if the war only ended to open a new one.”

But this doesn’t mean he wants to leave it.

“When a city is destroyed, its people return to it to rebuild it; they do not leave it,” Subaih said, in response to the U.S. president’s vision for forcing Palestinians to resettle outside of Gaza. “If Trump wants to give me a castle in Egypt or Jordan, or even in America, I would not replace it with the rubble of my home,” he added.

Despite the ubiquitous destruction, signs of life are beginning to return to the area. Near Subaih’s residence in al-Shuja’iyya is Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, once a large bustling market in Gaza City adjacent to several historic sites, including the Zawiya Market, the Great Omari Mosque, and the Qaysariya Market. All of them were bombed during the war, but people have now revived these areas and cleared them of debris as best they could. The markets offer a variety of foods, such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, canned foods, and clothes. Prices are still high compared to their prewar levels, but they have begun to go down.

Residents have also organized themselves into groups of volunteers and worked on different sections of neighborhoods to manually clear roads of the rubble. Any serious rehabilitation of Gaza’s urban spaces must await the entry of construction materials and equipment, including cement, iron, bulldozers, trucks, and fuel needed to operate them.

Subaih said that the difficulties Gazans continue to endure deprive them of the joy of returning to their homes. Pointing to the side of the street where his home used to be and where thirty of his relatives and neighbors were killed, he said, “They returned us to Gaza, but they did not return Gaza to us.”