Trump warns US could withhold aid if Jordan and Egypt won’t receive Gazans

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to transfer the residents of the Gaza Strip to Egypt and Jordan sent shockwaves through their regimes, which have since started a diplomatic campaign to avert what they see as a threat to their regimes’ stability.

Despite this, Trump has repeatedly doubled down on his demand, culminating in Monday’s threat against two key allies of the U.S. in the region.

“If they don’t agree, I would conceivably withhold aid,” Trump told reporters, a day before Jordan’s King Abdullah II was due to visit the White House, and while Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdellaty was in the country.

Trump reiterated that he had talked to “various leaders of various countries in the not-so-distant area… I think they were very positive about providing land.”

Asked how he intended to convince King Abdullah to take in Gazans, Trump simply stated that he and other states’ leaders “have good hearts, I think they’ll take them.”

According to The Hill, the U.S. agreed in 2022 to provide Jordan with over $1 billion annually in foreign assistance. Egypt, which along with Israel was exempted from a recent aid freeze, received some $1.5 billion in assistance last year.

After his comments, Egyptian diplomatic sources told the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that the threat to cut aid to Egypt would render the Israeli-Egypt peace agreement “meaningless.”

They added that the relations with the U.S. were now at their tensest point in decades, and that the expected visit of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Washington this month would likely to be postponed, without explicitly stating whether this was a response to Trump’s comments.

Trump’s evacuation plans were met with a rare, unified response from the Arab countries of the region. While Saudi Arabia has taken the lead in the diplomatic arena, Egypt declared it will host a high-level conference to coordinate the Arab response to the plan in the coming weeks.

On Monday, Abdellaty met with State Secretary Marco Rubio, and stressed that the Arab countries are united in rejecting Trump’s plan, in line with the official position of the Palestinian Authority.

He also reiterated Egypt’s commitment to close coordination with the Trump administration “to achieve a just and lasting peace that ensures Palestinians' rights, including the establishment of an independent state on their entire national territory,” according to the Egyptian Ahram newspaper.

Rubio for his part noted “the importance of close cooperation to advance post-conflict planning for the governance and security of Gaza,” stressing that “Hamas can never govern Gaza or threaten Israel again,” according to State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce.

In response to Trump’s comments on Fox News that implied the evacuated Gazans would not have the right to return after reconstruction, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry stated that the challenges “threatening regional and international peace and security” were caused by “Israeli occupation and the recent Israeli aggression on Gaza.”

The only way to confront this, Egypt stated, is “for the international community to adopt an approach that respects the rights of all peoples in the region without discrimination or distinction.”