The US ambassador to Israel said Saturday there was no plan underway to force Palestinians out of Gaza, after two Israeli ministers laid out ideas this week for how the war-battered territory's two million residents might leave.
Ambassador Mike Huckabee made the comments to reporters while visiting Palestinian-Americans in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Is Israel planning to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza?
Ambassador Mike Huckabee said Saturday that no such plan exists. "I can tell you categorically there is no plan of the Israelis to displace people out of Gaza against their will," he told reporters. He added that neither Israel nor the United States supports forced displacement, though people should have the option to leave voluntarily.
What have Israeli ministers proposed for Gaza's population?
Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir laid out a plan on Thursday aiming for 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 on 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.
What did Huckabee say about voluntary departure from Gaza?
Huckabee said 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," he 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.
What is the wider context behind the displacement debate?
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 come in the run-up to Israel's 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 earlier stunned the world in his second term by proposing to displace all Palestinians at least temporarily from Gaza and turn the territory into a luxury resort, before backtracking after pushback from countries including Egypt, the only country other than Israel to border Gaza.
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