US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken categorically rejected the possibility of expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, calling it a “doomed idea”, arguing that Gazans should be able to stay while Israel fights Hamas, AFP notes.

Anthony Blinken is on a crisis tour of the Middle East following a bloody attack by Hamas in Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, and led to a crackdown that left at least 2,670 dead.

As Israel warned more than a million Gazans to leave the enclave’s north ahead of a ground invasion, Israeli politicians proposed pushing the Palestinians back into neighboring Egypt.

“I’ve heard directly from Palestinian Authority President (Mahmoud) Abbas and from virtually every other leader I’ve spoken to in the region that this idea is doomed to failure, so we will not support it,” Anthony Blinken said in an on-air interview at Sunday on the Saudi Al-Arabiya TV station.

“We believe that people should be able to stay in Gaza, their home. But we also want to make sure that they are safe and that they get the help they need,” he added.

Former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon called on Egypt to cooperate and set up tent camps for Palestinians, saying there was “almost endless space” in the Sinai Peninsula, a vast desert region formerly occupied by Israel.

Egypt rejected the idea, and the US secretary of state focused his visit on ways to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, the impoverished and densely populated enclave of 2.3 million people ruled by Hamas.

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, warned Blinken on Friday that the expulsion of the population from the Gaza Strip would mean a “second Nakba” – Arabic for “catastrophe” meaning the displacement and expulsion of more than 760,000 Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.