Hamas calls Trump's Gaza remarks ‘racist’

US President Donald Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians from the besieged Gaza Strip has drawn strong reactions from resistance groups inside the blockaded territory.

During an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said that Palestinians had "no alternative" but to leave their homes in Gaza.

"The whole thing is a mess," Trump said on Tuesday of Gaza, which has been decimated by the Israel aggression.

"I don't think people should be going back to Gaza. I think that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. They've lived like hell, they've lived like you're living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living. The only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is they have no alternative. What's the alternative? Go where? If they had an alternative, they'd much rather not go back to Gaza and live in a beautiful alternative that's safe," he said.

Trump made similar comments earlier in the day, calling Gaza a "demolition site" and saying that its inhabitants would be "thrilled" to live elsewhere.

"I don't how they could want to stay," he said, adding going to a new piece of land "would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had decades and decades of death."

Trump said Palestinians would "love" to leave their embattled homeland in Gaza and live elsewhere if given an option.

They would "love to leave Gaza," he told reporters at the White House. 

In a statement, Hamas rejected the proposal as racist, calling it a blatant attempt to ignore the Palestinian cause and deny their national rights.

Hamas said displacing Palestinians from Gaza was the real goal of the Israeli aggression against their territory.

The group stressed that President Trump’s idea is a recipe for creating chaos in the West Asia region.

"We consider it a recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region. Our people in the Gaza Strip will not allow these plans to pass," said Sami Abu Zuhri in a statement.

"What is required is an end to the occupation and aggression against our people, not their expulsion from their land."

Senior Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq also condemned  Trump for his latest comments.

"Our people in Gaza have thwarted displacement and deportation plans under bombardment for more than 15 months," Rishq said in a separate statement.

"They are rooted in their land and will not accept any schemes aimed at uprooting them from their homeland."

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad also reacted, saying 15 months of Israeli aggression against Gaza and 80,000 tons of American weapons could not displace the people of Gaza from their land.

The group underlined that Palestinians have always had the option of resistance which they have been practicing got more than 100 years.

President Trump has recently stated that the people of Gaza can be transferred to either Egypt or Jordan amid the destruction of the coastal sliver.

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Last week, Trump suggested cleaning out the Palestinian land and relocating the war-stricken people there to neighboring Arab countries, namely Egypt and Jordan.

"You're talking about probably a million and a half people ... I'd like Egypt to take people. And I'd like Jordan to take people," he said. "[W]e just clean out that whole thing," he said.

Trump’s recent remarks come ahead of his meeting with Netanyahu who had carried out a 15-month genocidal war against the people of Palestine in Gaza in which more than 47,300 people were killed, mostly women and children.  

The ceasefire between the Palestinian resistance group Hamas and Israel was reached after the regime failed to realize any of its wartime objectives, including freeing the captives, “eliminating” the Gazan resistance, and causing forced displacement of Gaza’s entire population to neighboring Egypt.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians began returning to the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

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