US ambassador says Israel has no plan to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza

US Ambassador Mike Huckabee said categorically that Israel was not planning to force Palestinians out of Gaza, after senior Israeli ministers publicly described plans for removing the territory's population.

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I can tell you categorically there is no plan of the Israelis to displace people out of Gaza against their will.

Speaking to reporters during a visit to Palestinian-Americans in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Huckabee said there was no Israeli plan to displace people from Gaza against their will. He said people should have the right to leave if they wished, but called it a disgrace to incarcerate Palestinians inside Gaza.

His comments followed a proposal from Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir described a seven-year plan that would see 250,000 Palestinians leave Gaza in its first year, followed by the territory's remaining roughly two million residents over the next six years. He called the proposal voluntary emigration.

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There is an open-mindedness if people wish to leave, that they should have the right to leave.

Defence Minister Israel Katz said a day earlier that Israel was ready to remove Palestinians from Gaza by land and sea, but was waiting for the United States to help determine where they would go. Katz said there was no real solution for Gaza without migration and claimed, without citing a source, that 80 percent of Gaza's residents wanted to leave but Hamas was preventing them.

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Nobody is suggesting there would be forced displacement, the Israelis are not, the Americans are not. I know of no one who supports that.

Huckabee said US President Donald Trump's administration wanted Palestinians to have the option to leave voluntarily. Trump had earlier proposed temporarily displacing all Palestinians from Gaza and redeveloping the territory as a luxury resort, before backing away after opposition from countries including Egypt. Forced displacement from occupied territory is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Nearly Gaza's entire population has already been displaced within the territory during Israel's military offensive, which followed the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

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There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration.