Moscow doesn’t reject Trump’s Gaza plan outright; Turkey, Hamas say it’s doomed
The Kremlin said Monday that it was waiting for more details on US President Donald Trump’s plan to buy the Gaza Strip and oust its residents.
The proposal, which Trump announced last Tuesday during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, has sparked outrage in the Muslim and Arab worlds. On Monday, a top Hamas official called it doomed, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated his rejection, saying Israel should pay for the damage it did to Gaza.
Responding after Trump’s plan was first announced, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated Moscow’s commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
However, asked on Monday whether the plan was acceptable to Moscow, Peskov did not rule it out outright.
“It’s worth waiting for some details here if we’re talking about a coherent plan of action,” said Peskov, while noting that the 2.2 million people living in Gaza were “probably the main issue.”
The Palestinians had been “promised a two-state solution to the Middle East problem by the relevant Security Council resolutions, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of questions like that. We don’t know the details yet, so we have to be patient,” he added.
Peskov, for the second straight day, also neither confirmed nor denied that Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken with Trump directly. The US president told reporters Sunday that he had spoken to Putin about ending the war in Ukraine.
Russia maintains diplomatic relations with Hamas, which is considered a terror group by most Western countries. Throughout the war in Gaza, Russia has hosted Hamas delegations several times.
Kahlil al-Hayya, a member of the terror group’s politburo, said Monday at the 46th anniversary of the Iranian revolution in Tehran that Trump’s Gaza plan was “doomed.”
Referring to Trump, the United States and the West, he added: “We will bring them down as we brought down the projects before them.”
Hamas has vehemently condemned Trump’s plan to push out Gaza’s residents, and reportedly indicated it could jeopardize the ceasefire and hostage release deal with Israel.
Erdogan, meanwhile, speaking in Malaysia on Monday, again rejected “the proposal to exile the Palestinians,” calling for the reconstruction of Gaza to begin and for Israel to foot the bill.
“We do not consider the proposal to exile the Palestinians from the lands they have lived in for thousands of years as something to be taken seriously,” said Erdogan, who also has hosted Hamas officials.
The Turkish leader, who is on a four-day tour of Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan, said before departing Sunday that Trump’s plan was unworthy of discussion and had been pushed on the White House by a “Zionist lobby.”
On Monday, he added: “No one has the power to force the Palestinian people to experience a second Nakba,” referring to the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Erdogan claimed Israel had caused $100 billion worth of damage to the Gaza Strip, and said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government should look for funds to “compensate” for the damage “instead of looking for a place for the people of Gaza.”
The Turkish president has been a harsh critic of the war in Gaza, likening Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, and cutting off his country’s robust trade ties with Israel.
On Sunday, Trump repeated his commitment to buying and owning Gaza, but said he could allow sections of the war-ravaged land to be rebuilt by other states in the Middle East, echoing an outline the US president received from a Washington-based economist.
Trump had previously said Israel would transfer ownership of Gaza to Washington after the war, but that US troops would not need to deploy in the Strip. He has also indicated Gazans would be ousted permanently as the US rebuilt the Strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Netanyahu and his allies have applauded the plan.
About two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed amid Israel’s offensive there, according to a United Nations report last year. The offensive was launched in response to the Hamas-led onslaught in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, when thousands of terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
Source » timesofisrael.com
