Palestinian families wait to return to the northern Gaza Strip from the southern Gaza Strip, along Rashid Road, west of Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, on 26 January 2025. (Photo: Haitham Imad / EPA-EFE) 
Tens of thousands of Palestinians waited at roadblocks to return to their homes in northern Gaza on Sunday, voicing frustration after Israel accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire agreement and refused to open crossing points.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Sunday named Ilan Rom, a longtime intelligence official, as the Finance Ministry’s director-general.
Trump says Jordan, Egypt should take in Palestinians from Gaza
US President Donald Trump said Jordan and Egypt should take in Palestinians from war-ravaged Gaza, a suggestion rejected by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs the enclave, and apparently rebuffed by the Jordanian foreign minister.
Asked if this was a temporary or long-term solution for Gaza, where Israel’s military assault has caused a dire humanitarian situation and killed tens of thousands, Trump said on Saturday: “Could be either.”
Jordan is already home to several million Palestinians, while tens of thousands live in Egypt. Both countries and other Arab nations reject the idea of Palestinians in Gaza being moved to their countries. Gaza is land that Palestinians would want as part of a future Palestinian state.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has repeatedly called for the return of Jewish settlers to Gaza, welcomed Trump’s call as “an excellent idea” and said he would work to develop a plan to implement it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected such notions, advocated by Smotrich.
A Hamas official echoed long-standing Palestinian fears about being driven permanently from their homes.
Palestinians “will not accept any offers or solutions, even if [such offers] appear to have good intentions under the guise of reconstruction, as announced in the proposals of US President Trump,” Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told Reuters.
Another Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, urged Trump not to repeat “failed” ideas tried by his predecessor Joe Biden.
“The people of Gaza have endured death and refused to leave their homeland and they will not leave it regardless of any other reasons,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Jordan also appeared to reject Trump’s suggestion, with its Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi telling reporters that the country’s stance against any displacement of Palestinians from Gaza remained “firm and unwavering”.
Egypt has yet to comment but has said on numerous occasions that it rejects any displacement of Palestinians.
Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the remarks. “Our people will remain steadfast and will not leave their homeland,” said a statement published by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Palestinian analyst Ghassan al-Khatib said Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Jordanians and Egyptians, would reject Trump’s plan: “I don’t think that there is a place in reality for such an idea.”
Referring to a call he had on Saturday with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Trump told reporters: “I said to him I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people.”
He added, “I’d like Egypt to take people,” and said he would speak to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday.
“You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” said Trump.
The population in the Palestinian enclave before the start of the Israel-Gaza war was around 2.3 million.
“It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” said Trump on Saturday.
Most of Gaza’s population has been internally displaced by the war. On Sunday, many of them rejected Trump’s suggestion.
“If he thinks he will forcibly displace the Palestinian people [then] this is impossible, impossible, impossible. The Palestinian people firmly believe that this land is theirs, this soil is their soil,” said Magdy Seidam.
The current Gaza conflict was triggered on 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent military assault on Gaza has killed more than 47,000 people, according to the Gaza health ministry. The fighting has currently paused amid a fragile ceasefire.
Israel blocks thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza
Tens of thousands of Palestinians waited at roadblocks to return to their homes in northern Gaza on Sunday, voicing frustration after Israel accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire agreement and refused to open crossing points.
A day after a second exchange of Israeli hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the holdup underlined the risks hanging over the truce between the militant group and Israel, longtime adversaries in a series of Gaza wars.
Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, will travel to Israel on Wednesday to oversee the Gaza ceasefire, Israel’s Channel 13 reported on Sunday, citing two Israeli officials.
In central Gaza, columns of people were waiting along the main roads leading north, some in vehicles and some on foot, said witnesses.
“A sea of people is waiting for a signal to move back to Gaza City and the north,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a displaced person from Gaza City. “This is the deal that was signed, isn’t it?”
“Many of those people have no idea whether their houses back home are still standing. But they want to go regardless, they want to put up the tents next to the rubble of their houses, they want to feel home,” he told Reuters via a chat app.
On Sunday, witnesses said many people had slept overnight on the Salahuddin Road, the main thoroughfare running north to south and on the coastal road leading north, waiting to pass the Israeli military positions in the Netzarim corridor running across the centre of the Gaza Strip.
Al-Awda Hospital officials said one Palestinian was killed and 15 others wounded by Israeli fire, from soldiers apparently trying to prevent people from coming too close along the coastal road. The Israeli military said it fired warning shots at suspects who posed a threat to its troops.
Cars, trucks and rickshaws were overloaded with mattresses, food, and tents that served as shelters for over a year for those in the central and southern areas of the enclave.
Under the agreement worked out with Egyptian and Qatari mediators and backed by the US, Israel was meant to allow Palestinians displaced from the north to return to their homes.
But Israel said that Hamas’ failure to hand over a list detailing which of the hostages scheduled for release were alive or to hand over Arbel Yehud, an Israeli woman taken hostage from her kibbutz home during the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, meant it had violated the agreement.
As a result, checkpoints in central Gaza would not be opened to allow crossings into the north, it said in a statement. Hamas blamed Israel for the delay and accused it of stalling.
Mediators were holding intensive talks to resolve the dispute and see Yehud freed earlier than the next scheduled swap on Saturday, said a Palestinian and an Israeli official.
An official with the Gaza militant group that is holding her, Islamic Jihad, said such an accommodation has been agreed but the Israeli official said talks were still ongoing, though progress had been made.
On Saturday, Trump instructed the US military to release 2,000-pound bombs that his predecessor Joe Biden had ordered to be withheld from delivery to Israel over concern about their impact on the civilian population of Gaza.
Israel names spy veteran as top Finance Ministry civil servant
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Sunday named Ilan Rom, a longtime intelligence official, as the Finance Ministry’s director-general.
As the ministry’s top civil servant, Rom will replace Shlomi Heisler, who said he was stepping down this month after two years in the post for “urgent personal reasons”.
Rom served 25 years at Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
For the last 2½ years, Rom was chief executive of Israel’s largest regional council, Mateh Binyamin. The ministry noted that at the council, he spearheaded significant changes, focusing on economic development, including the accelerated planning and development of five major industrial zones.
He also led a deep economic efficiency initiative, achieving budgetary balance and profitability in the council for the first time, even during wartime, the ministry said.
“The tasks before us are challenging. I intend to dedicate all my efforts to the economic development of the state during this long and difficult war to alleviate the cost of living and encourage growth engines,” said Rom in a statement referring to Israel’s 15-month-old war against Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli forces kill 22 people in south Lebanon
Israeli forces killed 22 people in south Lebanon on Sunday as a deadline for their withdrawal passed and thousands of people tried to return to their homes in defiance of Israeli military orders, said Lebanese authorities.
Israel said on Friday it would keep troops in the south beyond the Sunday deadline set out in a US-brokered ceasefire that halted last year’s war with Hezbollah, saying Lebanon had not yet fully enforced terms requiring south Lebanon to be free of Hezbollah arms and the Lebanese army to be deployed.
Lebanon’s US-backed military, which reported one of its soldiers among those killed by Israeli forces on Sunday, has accused Israel of procrastinating in its withdrawal.
The Hezbollah-Israel conflict was fought in parallel with the Gaza war and peaked in a major Israeli offensive that uprooted more than a million people in Lebanon and left the Iran-backed group badly weakened.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 22 people were killed and another 124 wounded in numerous locations in the south, as a result of what it described as Israeli attacks on citizens while they were trying to enter their still-occupied towns.
The Israeli military said that its troops “operating in southern Lebanon fired warning shots to remove threats in a number of areas where suspects were identified approaching the troops”. It also said “a number of suspects ... that posed an imminent threat” were apprehended.
Hezbollah’s al-Manar television, broadcasting from several locations in the south, showed footage of residents moving towards villages early on Sunday, some holding the group’s flag and images of Hezbollah fighters killed in the war.
An Israeli military spokesperson, addressing the people of south Lebanon in a post on X, accused Hezbollah of trying to “heat up the situation” and said the Israeli army would “in the near future” inform them of places to which they can return.
Hezbollah has put the onus on the Lebanese state to ensure Israel’s withdrawal.
Hezbollah legislator Hassan Fadlallah said Lebanon was committed to the ceasefire deal but that Israel had turned against it with US support. The White House said on Friday that a short, temporary ceasefire extension was urgently needed.
UN experts decry arrest of pro-Palestinian American journalist in Zurich
UN human rights experts and activists on Sunday condemned the arrest of an American, pro-Palestinian journalist in the Swiss city of Zurich, saying it raised concerns about freedom of speech.
Ali Abunimah, the executive director of the online publication Electronic Intifada, which calls itself “Palestine’s weapon of mass instruction”, was arrested by Swiss police on Saturday afternoon ahead of a speech in Zurich, the organisation said in a statement.
Swiss police confirmed that a 53-year-old American had been arrested, citing an entry ban, and said further measures under its immigration law were being considered.
The UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, called it “shocking news” and urged Switzerland to investigate and release him in a post on X.
“The climate surrounding freedom of speech in Europe is becoming increasingly toxic, and we should all be concerned,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories.
Unrwa says Israel ordered it to stop East Jerusalem operations this week
The United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency said on Sunday it had been ordered by Israel to vacate premises and cease all of its operations in occupied East Jerusalem by Thursday.
Israeli legislators in October passed a law banning Unrwa from the country and also prohibiting Israeli authorities from having contact with the agency.
Most of the international community, including the UN, considers East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank and Gaza, to be territory occupied by Israel. However, the Israeli government considers all of Jerusalem to be part of the country.
Unrwa said the order to cease operations was contradictory to Israel’s international obligations as a UN member state.
UNRWA has a total workforce of about 30,000 people working with Palestinian refugees around the Middle East.
Israeli firms will take part in Paris Air Show, says Netanyahu
Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday that French President Emmanuel Macron had given him assurances that Israeli companies would be able to take part in the Paris Air Show.
The two had a phone conversation during which the assurance was given, according to a statement by the prime minister’s office.
Separately, Macron’s office said in a statement that the presence of Israeli companies at the air show “could be favourably considered, as a result of the ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon”.
Israeli defence companies were last year banned from participating in a defence industry exhibition held in Paris as Macron called for Israel to cease some military operations in Gaza.
That ban strained relations, but a French court in October overturned a government ban on Israeli companies taking part in a naval arms exhibition near Paris.
The Paris Air Show, the world’s largest, is held every two years, alternating every other year with Farnborough in Britain. It is due to take place from 16-22 June. Leading aerospace, aviation and defence companies from around the world typically take part in both events. DM
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