MEZIESBLOG

We heard earlier from the UK environment secretary, who said the two-state solution is the only path to peace.

Foreign secretary David Lammy has reiterated that view, telling reporters this morning “we’ve always been clear in our belief that we must see two states”.

“We must see Palestinians live and prosper in their homelands in Gaza and the West Bank,” he said at a news conference in Kyiv, where he has gone to announce £55m in aid to Ukraine.

His Spanish counterpart Jose Manuel Albares echoed his comments, telling media “I want to be very clear on this: Gaza is the land of Gazan Palestinians and they must stay in Gaza”.

France’s foreign ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine said the country “reiterates its opposition to any forced displacement of the Palestinian population of Gaza”.

This would present a “major obstacle to the two-state solution”, he added.

Starmer: Palestinians ‘must be allowed home’

Prime Minister’s Questions has just finished in Westminster – and as expected Sir Keir Starmer weighed in on Donald Trump’s idea to resettle Palestinians in Gaza elsewhere.

“They must be allowed home, they must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution,” he told MPs in the Commons.

He also said the “most important issue” at the moment is making sure the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel holds. 

He was responding to a question from the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey, who criticised Trump in a post on social media earlier today.

“When we desperately need a fragile truce to hold, Trump’s ramblings on Gaza risk having the effect of a bull in a china shop,” he wrote.

“The UK needs to make clear that these proposals must be rejected, and that we support international law and a two-state solution based on 1967 borders.”

Trump’s Gaza solution betrays his ignorance of history – and could make the conflict worse

By Dominic Waghorn, international affairs analyst

For a man ignorant in the history and ways of the Middle East, it makes perfect sense.

The people of Gaza do not have homes to go back to, their land is a living hell and has brought them nothing but suffering. 

Surely the world can get together and build them somewhere nice where they can live instead.

Donald Trump should know better than that, you might say. He is, after all, the leader of the free world and has at his disposal as many foreign policy advisers as he cares to listen to.

If he had asked them, they would have told him there are a few issues with his proposal that the people of Gaza leave and don’t go back.

Three reasons why it is unworkable

First, they regard Gaza as their home. They are fiercely proud of their heritage and their history of being there. Ask anyone who has ever been to Gaza. 

Second, contrary to the US president’s claim that many countries have offered to help take them in, none has done so publicly.

In fact, Israel’s immediate neighbours Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia have all dismissed the idea out of hand.

But third, and more to the point, there is a long and dark history of Palestinians being encouraged one way or another to leave their homes never to return.

Many of those living in Gaza’s “refugee camps” are descendants of the victims of the Nakba, as they call it, or the catastrophe when during Israel’s first war of independence they had to flee homes on land that is now in Israel.

They believe they should be allowed to return to that land, which they say Israelis wrongly took from them.

Any acquiescence with another mass displacement would be a betrayal of their forefathers’ rights of return, they believe.

Emboldening far right

In the early days of the Gaza war, Israeli right-wing politicians quietly pushed the idea that maybe the world could take Gazans in, give them a better life etc.

They don’t really want to live there anyway, we were told, they’d be much better off in Michigan, or the emptier bits of Europe, or maybe Jordan and Egypt might be persuaded to take in more in return for the huge amounts of American aid they receive.

Those politicians and diplomats understand their neighbours more than Trump – or should do and should have known better.  But the idea never went away.

Trump, it seems, was listening and is now advocating the idea despite all its obvious shortcomings.

That will embolden far-right Jewish extremists in the Netanyahu government who openly advocate the return of Israeli settlers to occupy Gaza. We’ve already heard praise for the plan from Itamar Ben-Gvir – see post at 946am.

But it will do nothing to bring a solution to the conflict – quite the opposite.