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True purpose of Trump’s plan is ‘to bury’ two-state solution: Egyptian ex-minister
Hussein Haridy, Egypt’s former assistant foreign minister, says Cairo will “stand firm” in the wake of Trump’s plan for the US to “take over” the Gaza Strip and move the Palestinians of the enclave to Jordan and Egypt.
“Egypt has made its official position clear. We do not see eye to eye with President Trump’s plan. We don’t think his plan is achievable, or practical,” Haridy told Al Jazeera.
“As such, we are afraid that the true purpose of it is to bury the two-state solution. Egypt has always been committed to a two-state solution, because we believe that without it, insecurity and instability will remain with us in the Middle East,” he said.
Haridy hopes the US will not exert undue pressure on Egypt but also believes that Cairo could withstand it.
“From 1967 until today, American-Egyptian relations have seen ups and downs. We have seen tremendous pressure from the US side to push Egypt to accept certain arrangements concerning Israel. In all these instances, Egypt stood firm. And at the end of the day, the Egyptian point of view prevailed,” he said.
Haridy pointed to key differences in US and Egyptian political objectives: “We have our own national security interests"
Egypt says Gaza displacement plan would ‘incite a return of fighting’
Egypt rejects and will not be part of any proposal to displace Palestinians from Gaza, its foreign ministry said.
The country, which borders the tiny enclave, denounced expressions of support by Israeli cabinet members for Trump’s plan to create a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza under US control.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered the army to prepare a plan to allow for the “voluntary departure” of Gaza residents from the strip, Israeli media reported.
Apparently referring to Katz’s order, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said, “Egypt stresses the catastrophic consequences of this irresponsible act which weakens the ceasefire negotiations, and would squash them and incite a return of fighting.”
Trump’s plan to colonise Gaza is rooted in an old white fantasy
The declaration by US President Donald Trump that he planned to expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turn it into an American-controlled “Riviera of the Middle East” has rightly drawn condemnation from across the globe, including, ironically, from Western nations that backed Israel’s genocidal bombardment that devastated the territory.
Many point out that ethnic cleansing violates international law and that the Geneva Conventions explicitly forbid the forcible displacement of civilian populations, for any reason.
This is all true but as an African, I was drawn to a slightly different aspect of Trump’s declaration: his imagined entitlement to other people’s land.
The claims he is making to having the right to take Gaza should not be isolated from the claims he has made on Greenland and Panamanian territory.
They all spring from the same root, one that has been nurtured by half a millennium of European colonial aggrandisement.
A drone view shows Palestinians, forcibly displaced to the south by Israel during the war, making their way back to their homes in northern Gaza, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, on January 27
Trump’s Gaza plan ‘strictly prohibited’ under international law: UN rights chief
Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief, has said that US President Donald Trump’s proposal to “take over” Gaza and move Palestinians from the war-ravaged territory would be illegal under international law.
“The right to self-determination is a fundamental principle of international law and must be protected by all states, as the International Court of Justice recently underlined afresh,” he said. “Any forcible transfer in or deportation of people from occupied territory is strictly prohibited.”
Turk’s statement is reflected in Article 49 of the Geneva Convention relative to “the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War”.
It stipulates that “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
That that even needs to be said....
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