Jordan will not become complicit in another expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on Wednesday.
The Hashemite kingdom is doing all it can to stop the conflict but will treat any attempt to displace Palestinians as “a declaration of war,” Safadi vowed, as quoted by the Roya News outlet.
Amman will not allow “a new catastrophe” nor will it let Israel “shift the crisis created and exacerbated by the occupation to neighboring countries,” he added.
Nakba, or Catastrophe is a reference to the destruction of the Palestinian homeland by Zionist militias in 1948, resulting in an exodus of nearly 80,000 Palestinians, majority of Palestine’s population at the time.
It was done with direct support from Britain, which ruled ‘mandate Palestine’ for decades prior to the Zionist takeover, forming the State of Israel in May 1948.
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‘War Crime’
Displacing the Palestinians from Gaza to another country would be a war crime, Safadi said, accusing Israel of already engaging in war crimes against the Palestinian people.
“There is no justification for what Israel is doing in Gaza,” the Jordanian foreign minister said. “We demand for the war to be stopped, to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza Strip and to protect civilians.”
Rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government declared war on Gaza after October 7, when Hamas launched hundreds of rockets at Israel and sent fighters into nearby Jewish settlements. Over 1,300 Israelis were killed in the incursion, according to the Israeli government.
Since then, Israel has launched a war that seems to be directly mostly at the civilian population in the Strip, killing nearly 3,500 Palestinians and wounding over 12,000 more. Most of them, according to UN reports are women and children.
Also, Israel, which has already imposed a siege on Gaza for the last 17 years, tightening the siege, blocking the entry of food, water, fuel and bombing much of the Strip’s infrastructure.
Egypt, on the other hand has argued that admitting Palestinians into Egypt would amount to helping Israel engage in “ethnic cleansing,” in which they want no part.
Egypt has offered to send humanitarian aid to Gaza, but Israel has opposed that on grounds that some of it might end up in the hands of Hamas.
“All indications suggest that the worst is yet to come, and that Tel Aviv is heading towards a ground invasion,” Safad said on Wednesday.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
