Updated February 11, 2025 at 15:08 PM ET
President Trump met with the king of Jordan at the White House Tuesday and insisted he would move forward with his vision for the United States to "take" the Gaza Strip, move its residents to Jordan and other Arab nations, and redevelop the heavily damaged territory.
Jordanian King Abdullah II said that Arab nations in the region will soon meet and later present their own plan to Trump.
"I think the point is: How do we make this work in a way that is good for everybody? 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 king said.
"We will be in Saudi Arabia to discuss how we can work with the president and with the United States. So I think let's wait until the Egyptians can come and present it to the president and not get ahead of ourselves," Abdullah said.
Trump was doubling down on a proposal he had made last week that drew broad condemnation from Palestinians, Arab states and other countries, but which Israel has embraced. United Nations officials and legal experts have warned that seizing Gaza and deporting its 2 million people would violate international law.
The king of Jordan — a key strategic partner of the U.S. in the Middle East — announced in Washington Tuesday that his country would take in 2,000 children from Gaza who have cancer or are sick and provide them with medical treatment.
Trump welcomed the offer, but insisted that the U.S. would be "in control" of Gaza and that all of the territory's population would leave.
"The Palestinians, or the people that live now in Gaza, will be living beautifully in another location," Trump said. "I believe we'll have a parcel of land in Jordan. I believe we'll have a parcel of land in Egypt. We may have someplace else, but I think when we finish our talks, we'll have a place where they're going to live very happily and very safely."
Trump said people living in Gaza "don't want to be in the Gaza Strip" and dismissed a question from a reporter about whether his vision represented "ethnic cleansing" for the territory, as the U.N. secretary-general has warned. Trump insisted that relocating 2 million people would be "a very small number of people."
Earlier this week, Trump had said he would "conceivably withhold aid" from Jordan and Egypt if they did not agree to take Gaza's residents.
Asked on Tuesday if he would, Trump said, "I don't have to threaten with money. We do, we contribute a lot of money to Jordan and to Egypt, by the way — a lot to both — but I don't have to threaten that, I don't think. I think we're above that."
Speaking to NPR before the White House visit, former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said Trump's plan would breach a key part of the peace deal Jordan signed with Israel in 1994.
"This is an existential issue to Jordan that does not lend itself to any economic pressure from the United States," said Muasher, now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Many of Jordan's citizens are descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes during and after the creation of Israel in the late 1940s and in subsequent wars, and were never allowed back. Jordan and other Arab countries have historically resisted accommodating more Palestinian refugees out of fear that it would weaken the case for a Palestinian state and the refugees' right to return.
Muasher said Saudi resistance could put the brakes on Trump's plan. The U.S. president wants to broker a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Gulf state, and Israel. Saudi Arabia last week said expelling Palestinians would stand in the way of any normalization talks.
"Those are very strong words," says Muasher. The White House "probably will take the Saudi position very seriously."
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