“They'll do it,” Donald Trump said on Thursday, referring to Jordan's and Egypt's reception of displaced Palestinians, even though these two countries reject the transfer mentioned by the American president.

“We're doing a lot for them, and they're going to do a lot for us,” the Republican president told a reporter at the White House when asked how he could get Amman and Cairo to change their position. He gave no further details.

Egypt's Abdel Fattah al-Sissi and Jordan's King Abdullah II categorically rejected Trump's idea of transferring Palestinians from Gaza to their countries on Wednesday. “The deportation and displacement of Palestinians from their land is an injustice in which we will have no part,” said the former. The latter underlined in a statement “Jordan's firm position on the need to keep Palestinians on their land and allow them to obtain their legitimate rights, in line with the two-state solution.”

While almost all the 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, under siege by Israel, have been displaced by the war, the American president had put forward the idea on Saturday of sending them to Jordan and Egypt in order, in his view, to “clean house” in the Palestinian territory.

On Monday, Trump reaffirmed that Gazans “could live in much safer and perhaps much more comfortable areas.” His proposal triggered a volley of condemnations in the Middle East and Europe.