‘Feels like a call for 2nd Nakba’: Palestinians react to Trump’s Gaza plan

Mohammed Awed Alkafarna was not even born when his grandparents and other family members were forced out of their homes and land in one of the biggest human displacements in modern history.

But he has grown up listening to stories passed down word of mouth about the horrors that befell hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in what is now known as the Nakba – the catastrophe – of 1948.

Alkafarna, a lawyer and human rights activist based in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, however, has seen the worst of Israeli brutality, having survived a genocidal war the Jewish state unleashed on the enclave, killing over 48,000 people in just fifteen months.

And the young Palestinian braces for the worst as US President Donald Trump doubles down on a highly-criticised proposal to drive out the people of Gaza to “rebuild” the devastated enclave.

"These statements about displacement are very similar to what happened to our grandparents and family, who were forced out of their land in 1948 under threat and at gunpoint," Alkafarna tells TRT World.

Alkafarna, however, feels that the situation is worse than in 1948 because the world is watching in real-time the atrocities unfolding in Palestinian land, just like the live-streamed Gaza genocide.

"The difference between this (genocide) and the Nakba is that today, human rights organisations and international courts–which did not exist back then– are present, witnessing what is happening, yet they are unable to protect Palestinians," Alkafarna adds.

Trump has claimed that while Israel will hand over Gaza to the US after the war, all Palestinians must leave the enclave to enable its rebuilding.

"Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the US owning that piece of land," Trump said shortly after a meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.

For Palestinians of Gaza – forced to relocate multiple times since October 7, 2023 – the outlandish idea is eerily similar to the Nakba, when Zionist gangs forcibly expelled over 750,000 Palestinians to establish Israel, occupying 78 percent of the land and fragmenting Palestinian society.

The occupation deepened in 1967 when Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, gradually carving up Palestinian territories through illegal settlements, military control, and blockades.

Today, Gaza remains isolated under siege, while the occupied West Bank is divided by checkpoints and illegal settlements, leaving Palestine a collection of disconnected, shrinking pieces of land.

A continuing nightmare

Like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, Alkafarna's life has been severely upended by the genocidal war that turned the coastal enclave into a dystopian landscape – littered with rotting corpses and mountains of twisted metal and concrete rubble.

His family home has been totally destroyed, as are those of relatives, by Israeli air strikes.

The family of nine has been torn apart, with his mother and one of his sisters, Maryam, having been shifted to Qatar for treatment for treatment of injuries suffered in Israeli bombardment in northern Gaza. Maryam also lost her husband.

Even after fleeing south, the attacks didn’t stop. His sister Sajida and her in-laws’ family members were also injured, while his diabetic brother Ezz el-Din’s health deteriorated due to lack of insulin.

“I lost my close friend, my childhood friend, my cousin, and I lost a large number of my relatives and friends. I lost my friends whom I met in school, I lost my friends whom I met in university while studying law, and I lost my friends in my professional life who would have been brilliant lawyers had the Israeli occupation not killed them,” Alkafarna adds.

Others like Mohammed Kahlout say that only death can separate them from their beloved Gaza.

"We reject leaving Gaza," Kahlout, 27, a Palestinian human rights activist, tells TRT World, referring to Trump’s proposal.

Kahlout has endured 15 months of genocide, constantly displaced from one location to another until the latest ceasefire deal. It was then that he returned to his home in northern Gaza, only to find his entire neighbourhood reduced to rubble.

"We will not leave Gaza unless it is for Heaven. If we ever leave Gaza, Heaven is the only place we will go," Kahlout says.

"We have lost many…in this war. We see leaving Gaza as a betrayal of our martyrs’ blood."

For Palestinians, the deep sense of belonging is seen as the source of their resilience in the face of decades of Israeli atrocities.

Following the ceasefire, people returned to their homes, only to find localities wiped out and civic facilities destroyed, with Israel systematically targeting hospitals, infrastructure, water wells, and municipalities.

"My brothers found nothing…the occupation had completely wiped out the city, deliberately destroying infrastructure…so that people would have no access to water or even a place to pitch their tents," Alkafarna says.

Global outcry

Global condemnation against Trump’s proposal has been swift and unanimous.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has strongly rejected plans to create an “alternative homeland” for Palestinians, stating that "no one can displace Palestinians from their historic homeland; no one can cause another Nakba for them".

Trump's plan appeared to come as a shock to even his own administration because the day after the announcement, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to walk back on the suggestion that Palestinians would be permanently resettled, saying they would only be relocated temporarily.

Even Trump couldn't directly respond to a journalist’s query on how and under what authority the US could take over Gaza and occupy it in the long term because there exists no such provision under international law.

Kahlout asserts that neither Trump nor anybody else has any right to expel Palestinians from their land.

“Gaza’s land is not for sale. Its price is too high…We will not accept an alternative homeland or forced displacement until we die on our land. (Even) Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid did not give up even an inch of Palestine, and we won’t give up Gaza too, we will not abandon it,” Kahlout adds.

Kahlout was referring to the attempt of Theodor Herzl, the leader of the Zionist movement, who sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Herzl approached Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II with an offer to pay off a significant portion of the empire's debt in exchange for permission to settle Jews in Palestine.

Sultan Abdulhamid II firmly rejected this proposal, stating, "I won't sell anything, not even an inch of this territory, because this country does not belong to me but to all Ottomans.”

Some Palestinians, however, see Western hypocrisy in the recent developments despite the growing global support for a two-state solution to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict.

"Today, everyone is talking about the fact that the Palestinians' exodus from their land is a clear violation of human rights and international law, while most of these countries contributed to the Israeli government’s killing of Palestinians directly or indirectly," says Alkafarna.

"For 76 years, Palestinians have demanded their right to establish a state with Jerusalem as its capital. Where were the rights of the Palestinian people before? Did they not exist until now?”