The US ambassador to Israel said on Saturday there was no plan underway to force Palestinians out of Gaza, after Israeli ministers laid out ideas on how to expel the war-battered territory’s two million people.
“I can tell you categorically there is no plan of the Israelis to displace people out of Gaza against their will,” Ambassador Mike Huckabee told reporters as he visited Palestinian-Americans in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir laid out a plan on Thursday that aims to see 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 for the United States, which he said was discussing where the population would go. Katz, without citing his source, claimed 80 per cent of people in Gaza wanted to leave but that Hamas was preventing them.
Huckabee said that 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,” Huckabee 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.
Virtually the entire population of Gaza has already been displaced internally by Israel’s military offensive following the Hamas-led Oct 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 on displacement come in the run-up to the 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 stunned the world early in his second term by proposing to displace all Palestinians at least temporarily from Gaza and turn the rubble-strewn Mediterranean territory into a luxury resort.
He backtracked after pushback from countries including Egypt, the only country other than Israel to border Gaza.
The US ambassador to Israel also said that the Israeli government bore responsibility for West Bank Palestinians’ safety and should impose “severe consequences” over violence, as he visited families after a surge in settler attacks.
Mike Huckabee, long known as a staunch supporter of Israel and settlers, visited a Palestinian-American’s home in the West Bank that has been repeatedly targeted by settlers and said he wanted to hear the community’s “legitimate grievances”.
As the ambassador met families inside a finely manicured old house in the town of Turmus Ayya, where around 80pc of the 4,000 residents hold US citizenship, a settler from a nearby illegal outpost approached in a quad bike.
“One of the messages that we have been sending and we will continue to send is that people in these communities have a right to live with a level of security and safety, and that the government has a responsibility to make sure that that happens,” Huckabee said.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and violence by Israeli settlers towards Palestinian residents has persisted for years, often with little or no legal consequence, but recent months have seen a surge in attacks ahead of October 27 elections.
Huckabee stopped short of criticising Israel by name but said: “Our clear message is that crime is crime, terror is terror.
“When people do it they should have an expectation that they will have severe consequences,” Huckabee said.
He said that taking action was in the “best interest” of Israel, which already faces growing criticism around the world, including in key ally the United States, over the devastating offensive in Gaza in response to the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attack.
“Their reputation does not do well when it appears that this tiny little group of marauders are somehow representative of the larger population. I don’t believe that it is,” Huckabee said.
“There may be a few hundred who are responsible, but that’s a few hundred too many,” Huckabee said.
“We have many issues that we will address,” Nawwaf Zaghoul, the town’s mayor, told reporters ahead of the meeting, describing what he said were constant attacks by settlers.
He said that the town’s residents would be asking the ambassador to help secure their safety and security. About 80 per cent of the town’s roughly 3,000 residents were Palestinian Americans, he said.
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