A Mosul book cafe raises political awareness in the run-up to Iraq elections

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Election hopefuls are using Mosul’s Book Forum cafe to reverse the trend of political apathy among the Iraqi youth. Just 4 years ago, the city served as the capital of Daesh’s brutal caliphate. (AFP)
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Election hopefuls are using Mosul’s Book Forum cafe to reverse the trend of political apathy among the Iraqi youth. Just 4 years ago, the city served as the capital of Daesh’s brutal caliphate. (AFP)
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Election hopefuls are using Mosul’s Book Forum cafe to reverse the trend of political apathy among the Iraqi youth. Just 4 years ago, the city served as the capital of Daesh’s brutal caliphate. (AFP)
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Updated 10 October 2021
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A Mosul book cafe raises political awareness in the run-up to Iraq elections

  • Book Forum becomes focal point for political debate before Oct. 10 parliamentary elections
  • The Khutwa Club is helping young Iraqi men and women turn their idealism into action

MOSUL, Iraq/BOGOTA, Colombia: Taking a seat at the top table in Mosul’s Book Forum cafe one evening in September, political blogger Saad Amer introduced his two guest speakers, both independent candidates running in Iraq’s Oct. 10 parliamentary elections.

This was the fifth such event organized by the Khutwa Club, a debating society that meets regularly at the northern city’s popular cafe — its foremost cultural and literary venue.

Since Mosul was retaken from Daesh extremists in 2017, the cafe has become a popular and widely celebrated hub for young activists, academics, journalists and students to share ideas.

In a country where politics is dominated by armed groups and where critics are often murdered with impunity, the Khutwa Club’s success in motivating a mostly apathetic youth is a remarkable feat in itself.

“There is a huge gap between citizens and the political system in Iraq,” Harith Yaseen Abdulqader, the Book Forum’s co-founder, told Arab News during a Khutwa Club event.

“Our goal is to help people look in-depth at the Iraqi political system and how to spread awareness among the people so that they can choose the best candidate for them, to understand the electoral program of the candidates, and understand the gaps in their programs.”

Political education is at the core of the Khutwa Club’s mission. In 2003, after decades of Baathist rule, the US and other Western powers installed a democratic system in Baghdad modelled on their own time-honored institutions.

The tenets of Western-style democracy were alien to many Iraqis, who for centuries had conducted their affairs along tribal and religious lines. Foreign powers, armed groups and corrupt individuals soon took advantage of the situation, fashioning a system that was democratic in name only.




The Khutwa Club offers independent candidates a platform to discuss their programs ahead of Iraq’s parliamentary election. (Meethak Al-Khatib for Arab News)

“The goal of this club is to educate citizens about common political terms, aspects and ideas,” Abdulqader said. “Perhaps a citizen doesn’t know what liberalism is, what civic politics is, or what political Islam is, or the difference between the ruling parties and the Islamist parties.”

There is certainly a thirst for such ideas among Iraq’s swelling ranks of jobless educated youth. Fed up with the country’s ruling elite, young Iraqis marched in their hundreds of thousands in cities across the country in October 2019, demanding the overthrow of the post-2003 order.


ALSO READIraq’s young voters ponder how to effect meaningful change


Although the protests secured the resignation of then-prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the movement soon fizzled out with the onset of the global pandemic and under savage attack by pro-government militias.

Crucially, without a defined political leadership heading the movement, Iraq’s young protesters were unable to translate their energy and idealism into an electoral force capable of making their demands a reality. 

By offering discussions on political literacy and participation, the Khutwa Club and others like it might be the very platforms to make that transition possible.




Hosted by the Book Forum cafe, the Khutwa Club offers young Iraqis lessons on political literacy and participation. (Meethak Al-Khatib for Arab News)

“Maybe what we do here will open horizons for people who want to run for election in the future,” said Abdulqader. 

“We encourage young people to engage in politics. We are trying to create new young political faces with a large support base and with an understanding of the Iraqi political process. Maybe we can be the supporters for these young people if they decided to run for election.

“For more than 17 years we have seen the same political faces. They did not offer anything new. They still made the same fake promises. We need to focus on new faces, especially the young ones. There is a difference between the mentality of a 70-year-old politician and a 35-year-old.”




Election hopeful Asil Al-Agha says independent candidates are unlikely to succeed without a party machine behind them. (Meethak Al-Khatib for Arab News)

Seated in the audience is Obadiah Muhammad, a 22-year-old law student and one of the club’s regular attendees. He is grateful for the opportunity to hear from local candidates running on an independent ticket.

“Mosul suffers from the dominance of big political parties,” Muhammad told Arab News. “I wanted to come today to support independent candidates, to hear what they have to say, to see if I agree with them or not.”

The Khutwa Club is unique in providing a platform for candidates who would otherwise be drowned out by the dominant parties.

“The club offers an environment to exchange opinions and challenges its guests,” Muhammad said. “We did not have such a place before in Mosul and I see it as something extraordinary.”

Mosul, situated in Iraq’s Sunni-majority northwest, was not always so tolerant of political expression. Between 2014 and 2017, when the city was the capital of Daesh’s self-styled caliphate, free speech and democratic participation were brutally suppressed.




Daesh militants brutally suppressed free speech and democratic participation during their three-year rule in parts of Iraq and Syria, with Mosul as their capital. (File photo)

Even before the militants seized control, the city was anything but a bastion of free speech. Saad Amer, the political blogger chairing that evening’s Khutwa Club debate, remembers only too well how dangerous speaking out could be.

“Political thought was forbidden before 2014. Mosul had been controlled by Al-Qaeda since 2009. According to my memory, no one could speak of politics, or discuss secular or liberal ideas. Everyone was afraid,” the 28-year-old told Arab News on the meeting’s fringes.

“Everyone, including me, was just trying to keep up with life here, and when election day came, we would go to vote for a party from our ethnicity to protect us and our rights.

“After 2017, there was a sort of revolution that happened in Mosul. Young people started to feel more of a sense of freedom and more space for free speech, to speak our minds and discuss our thoughts in public.”

Even now, though, the Khutwa Club and its guests face occasional intimidation from forces that thrive in Iraq’s murky political environment.




An electoral banner hangs on the wall of a damaged building in Iraq's second city of Mosul on Oct. 3, 2021, ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections. (AFP)

“We do sometimes receive threats from certain political parties and some armed groups, but we always find a way to get around this and solve it,” Amer said. “Some of these threats include harsh language, not only for the club but also for the political opinions we have and our criticism of political parties.”

The independent candidates on the podium make a convincing case for a cleaner, fairer and more transparent system in Iraq, doing away with corruption, armed groups and foreign interference. But without a powerful party machinery to back them up, few stand a chance of entering parliament or effecting meaningful change once there.

Asil Al-Agha, 41, is one of the few female candidates standing for election in Mosul. A former member of Nineveh’s provincial council, running on an Iraq Renaissance and Peace Bloc ticket, Al-Agha has proven her mettle as a skilled campaigner, but is all too aware that she must operate within the confines of an imperfect system.

“A big proportion of people here are suffering from poverty and lack of jobs,” she told Arab News at her office near Mosul’s university campus. “Politicians will take advantage of this, promising jobs and money to buy votes.”




An electoral banner hangs on the wall of a damaged building in Iraq's second city of Mosul  on October 3, 2021, ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections.(AFP)

Al-Agha added: “One of the things that people suffer with here is bureaucratic red tape and corruption in state departments, where citizens are exploited and forced to pay bribes. To say nothing about health. We do not have government hospitals that provide the necessary treatment and good care.

“Even if I made it to Baghdad, it would be very difficult to work on these issues. I have to be strong and have a powerful political alliance where they can pressure others so we can get our rights. A lonely politician can’t get anything done alone. This is why I am running with a party, not independently.”

Iraq’s 2018 election, the first since the defeat of Daesh, saw the country’s lowest-ever turnout. Given the precarious health of Iraqi democracy, change from within may be the best and only hope for educated young Iraqis disillusioned by the failures of the October 2019 revolution.

“We believe that the only way to achieve change is to enter political work and participate in the elections to choose good people to run the government,” said Amer, closing the Khutwa Club event.

“This is the only available option.”

________________________

Twitter: @meethak55 and @RobertPEdwards 


Palestinians return to north Gaza after breakthrough on hostages

Updated 11 sec ago
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Palestinians return to north Gaza after breakthrough on hostages

  • Israel and Hamas said they had reached a deal for the release of another six hostages
  • Crowds began making their way north along a coastal road on foot Monday morning

NUSEIRAT, Palestinian Territories: Masses of displaced Palestinians began streaming toward the north of the war-battered Gaza Strip on Monday after Israel and Hamas said they had reached a deal for the release of another six hostages.

The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire and paves the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under an agreement aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents.

Israel had been preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the terms of the truce, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said late Sunday they would be allowed to pass after the new deal was reached.

Crowds began making their way north along a coastal road on foot Monday morning, carrying what belongings they could, AFPTV images showed.

“It’s a great feeling when you go back home, back to your family, relatives and loved ones, and inspect your house — if it is still a house,” displaced Gazan Ibrahim Abu Hassera said.

Hamas called the return “a victory” for Palestinians that “signals the failure and defeat of the plans for occupation and displacement.”

Its ally Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, called it a “response to all those who dream of displacing our people.”

The comments came after US President Donald Trump floated an idea to “clean out” Gaza and resettle Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt, drawing condemnation from regional leaders.

President Mahmud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, issued a “strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.

Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”

For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.

“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.

Trump had floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”

Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”

The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land,” saying their forced displacement could “only be called ethnic cleansing.”

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”

Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage to the north until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage who it maintained should have been freed on Saturday.

But Netanyahu’s office later said a deal had been reached for the release of three hostages on Thursday, including Yehud, as well as another three on Saturday.

Hamas confirmed the agreement in its own statement Monday.

During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held by the Israelis.

The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday in the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.

“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” said Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase.

The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”

Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.


EU to agree easing Syria sanctions

Updated 7 min 38 sec ago
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EU to agree easing Syria sanctions

  • Europe is keen to help the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and build bridges with its new leadership
  • But some EU countries worry about moving too fast to embrace the new Islamist-led rulers in Damascus

BRUSSELS: EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said she expected the bloc to agree Monday to begin easing sanctions on Syria after the ouster of Bashar Assad.
“It is a step for step approach,” Kallas said at the start of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels to discuss the move.
Europe is keen to help the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and build bridges with its new leadership after the end of the Assad family’s five-decade rule.
But some EU countries worry about moving too fast to embrace the new Islamist-led rulers in Damascus.
The 27-nation EU imposed wide-ranging sanctions on the Assad government and Syria’s economy during its civil war.
Brussels says it is now willing to ease sanctions on the expectation the new authorities make good on commitments to form an inclusive transition.
“If they are doing the right steps, then we are willing to do the steps on our behalf as well,” Kallas said.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the EU could start by suspending sanctions on the energy, transport and banking sectors.
Diplomats say the EU will only suspend the sanctions and not lift them definitively to maintain leverage over the Syrian leadership.
Syria’s new de facto leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, and the Islamist group he led Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, remain under EU sanctions.
Diplomats said there was still no discussion about lifting those designations, as with others on the Assad regime.


Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza

Updated 27 January 2025
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Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza

  • Netanyahu’s office says another six hostages to be released in coming week after talks with Hamas
  • Israel confirms Qatar’s announcement, says Gazans can now return home from 7 a.m. Monday

DOHA/JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY: Mediator Qatar announced early Monday that an agreement has been reached to release an Israeli civilian hostage and allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, easing the first major crisis of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Qatar’s statement said Hamas will hand over the civilian hostage, Arbel Yehoud, along with two other hostages before Friday. And on Monday, Israeli authorities will allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement said the hostage release — which will include soldier Agam Berger — will take place on Thursday, and confirmed that Palestinians can move north on Monday. Israel’s military said people can start crossing on foot at 7 a.m.

Under the ceasefire deal, Israel on Saturday was to begin allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza. But Israel put that on hold because of Yehoud, who Israel said should have been released on Saturday. Hamas accused Israel of violating the agreement.

Netanyahu's office said that another six hostages would be released in the coming week, after talks with Hamas. Three would be released on Thursday and another three on Saturday, said a statement from his office.

The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents, paving the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under a deal aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict.

Israel had been preventing vast crowds of Palestinians from using a coastal road to return to northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the truce agreement by failing to release civilian women hostages.

“Hamas has backtracked and will carry out an additional phase of releasing hostages this Thursday,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Trump’s plan meets mixed reactions

Palestinian leaders meanwhile slammed a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” Gaza, vowing to resist any effort to forcibly displace residents of the war-battered territory.

Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site,” adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out.

“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters.

Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.

Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”

Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable.”

For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.

“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.

Trump floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”

Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”

Tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’

The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land.”

“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing,” the league said in a statement.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”

In Gaza, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.

Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage. She is among those slated for return on Thursday, according to Netanyahu’s office.

Hamas said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.

Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said Monday that residents would be allowed to return on foot starting at 07 a.m. (0500 GMT) and by car at 9 a.m.

Staggered releases

During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday — the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.

Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase, demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday.

“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” he said.

The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”

Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.


Bittersweet return for Syrians with killed, missing relatives

Updated 27 January 2025
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Bittersweet return for Syrians with killed, missing relatives

  • “I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” says Wafa Mustafa, whose father Ali was among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system

DAMASCUS: Wafa Mustafa had long dreamed of returning to Syria but the absence of her father tarnished her homecoming more than a decade after he disappeared in Bashar Assad’s jails.
Her father Ali, an activist, is among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system, and whose relatives have flocked home in search of answers after Assad’s toppling last month by Islamist-led rebels.
“From December 8 until today, I have not felt any joy,” said Mustafa, 35, who returned from Berlin.
“I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” she said. “I walk down the street and remember that I had passed by that same corner with my dad” years before.
Since reaching Damascus she has scoured defunct security service branches, prisons, morgues and hospitals, hoping to glean any information about her long-lost father.
“You can see the fatigue on people’s faces” everywhere, said Mustafa, who works as a communications manager for the Syria Campaign, a rights group.

Members of the security forces of Syria's new administration inspect the Saydnaya prison in Damascus on January 3, 2025. The prison is infamous for its inhumane conditions and its central role in the violent repression carried out by the clan of the ousted Syian president Bashar al-Assad. (AFP)

In 2021, she was invited to testify at the United Nations about the fate of Syria’s disappeared.
The rebels who toppled Assad freed thousands of detainees nearly 14 years into a civil war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
Mustafa returned to Branch 215, one of Syria’s most notorious prisons run by military intelligence, where she herself had been detained simply for participating in pro-democracy protests in 2011.
She found documents there mentioning her father. “That’s already a start,” Mustafa said.
Now, she “wants the truth” and plans to continue searching for answers in Syria.
“I only dream of a grave, of having a place to go to in the morning to talk to my father,” she said. “Graves have become our biggest dream.”

In Damascus, Mustafa took part in a protest demanding justice for the disappeared and answers about their fate.

Syrian activist and former refugee Ayat Ahmad (C) lifts a placard as she attends a demonstration in Damascus on January 1, 2025. (AFP)

Youssef Sammawi, 29, was there too. He held up a picture of his cousin, whose arrest and beating in 2012 prompted Sammawi to flee for Germany.
A few years later, he identified his cousin’s corpse among the 55,000 images by a former military photographer codenamed “Caesar,” who defected and made the images public.
The photos taken between 2011 and 2013, authenticated by experts, show thousands of bodies tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.
“The joy I felt gave way to pain when I returned home, without being able to see my cousin,” Sammawi said.
He said his uncle had also been arrested and then executed after he went to see his son in the hospital.
“When I returned, it was the first time I truly realized that they were no longer there,” he said with sadness in his voice.
“My relatives had gotten used to their absence, but not me,” he added. “We demand that justice be served, to alleviate our suffering.”

A boy runs after a sheep next to tanks that belonged to the ousted Assad government, parked in front of a destroyed building in Palmyra, Syria, on Jan. 25, 2025. (AP)

While Assad’s fall allowed many to end their exile and seek answers, others are hesitant.
Fadwa Mahmoud, 70, told AFP she has had no news of her son and her husband, both opponents of the Assad government arrested upon arrival at Damascus airport in 2012.
She fled to Germany a year later and co-founded the Families For Freedom human rights group.
She said she has no plans to return to Syria just yet.
“No one really knows what might happen, so I prefer to stay cautious,” she said.
Mahmoud said she was disappointed that Syria’s new authorities, who pledged justice for victims of atrocities under Assad’s rule, “are not yet taking these cases seriously.”
She said Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa “has yet to do anything for missing Syrians,” yet “met Austin Tice’s mother two hours” after she arrived in the Syrian capital.
Tice is an American journalist missing in Syria since 2012.
Sharaa “did not respond” to requests from relatives of missing Syrians to meet him, Mahmoud said.
“The revolution would not have succeeded without the sacrifices of our detainees,” she said.
 


Trump’s Palestinian refugee idea falls flat with Jordan and confounds a Senate ally

Updated 27 January 2025
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Trump’s Palestinian refugee idea falls flat with Jordan and confounds a Senate ally

  • Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel but support the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War
  • Both Egypt and Jordan also have perpetually struggling economies and their governments, as well as those of other Arab states, fear massive destabilization of their own countries and the region from any such influx of refugees

DORAL, Florida: President Donald Trump’s push to have Egypt and Jordan take in large numbers of Palestinian refugees from besieged Gaza fell flat with those countries’ governments and left a key congressional ally in Washington perplexed on Sunday.
Fighting that broke out in the territory after ruling Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 is paused due to a fragile ceasefire, but much of Gaza’s population has been left largely homeless by an Israeli military campaign. Trump told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One that moving some 1.5 million people away from Gaza might mean that “we just clean out that whole thing.”
Trump relayed what he told Jordan’s King Abdullah when the two held a call earlier Saturday: “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’”
He said he was making a similar appeal to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi during a conversation they were having while Trump was at his Doral resort in Florida on Sunday. Trump said he would “like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people.”
Egypt and Jordan, along with the Palestinians, worry that Israel would never allow them to return to Gaza once they have left. Both Egypt and Jordan also have perpetually struggling economies and their governments, as well as those of other Arab states, fear massive destabilization of their own countries and the region from any such influx of refugees.
Jordan already is home to more than 2 million Palestinian refugees. Egypt has warned of the security implications of transferring large numbers of Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, bordering Gaza.
Trump suggested that resettling most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million could be temporary or long term.
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said Sunday that his country’s opposition to what Trump floated was “firm and unwavering.” Some Israel officials had raised the idea early in the war.
Egypt’s foreign minister issued a statement saying that the temporary or long-term transfer of Palestinians “risks expanding the conflict in the region.”
Trump does have leverage to wield over Jordan, which is a debt-strapped, but strategically important, US ally and is heavily dependent on foreign aid. The US is historically the single-largest provider of that aid, including more than $1.6 billion through the State Department in 2023.
Much of that comes as support for Jordan’s security forces and direct budget support.
Jordan in return has been a vital regional partner to the US in trying to help keep the region stable. Jordan hosts some 3,000 US troops. Yet, on Friday, new Secretary of State Marco Rubio exempted security assistance to Israel and Egypt but not to Jordan, when he laid out the details of a freeze on foreign assistance that Trump ordered on his first day in office.
Meantime, in the United States, even Trump loyalists tried to make sense of his words.
“I really don’t know,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” about what Trump meant by the ”clean out” remark. Graham, who is close to Trump, said the suggestion was not feasible.
“The idea that all the Palestinians are going to leave and go somewhere else, I don’t see that to be overly practical,” said Graham, R-S.C. He said Trump should keep talking to Mideast leaders, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and officials in the United Arab Emirates.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about. But go talk to MBS, go talk to UAE, go talk to Egypt,” Graham said. “What is their plan for the Palestinians? Do they want them all to leave?”
Trump, a staunch supporter of Israel, also announced Saturday that he had directed the US to release a supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Former President Joe Biden had imposed a hold due to concerns about their effects on Gaza’s civilian population.
Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel but support the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War. They fear that the permanent displacement of Gaza’s population could make that impossible.
In making his case for such a massive population shift, Trump said Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now.”
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location,” he said of people displaced in Gaza. “Where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”