A suggestion by President Donald Trump to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians raised new questions Sunday about United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East.

Trump’s comments appeared to echo the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza — an idea that goes to the heart of Palestinian fears that they will be driven from their remaining homelands, and one that is likely to be rejected by Egypt and Jordan.

“You’re talking about probably a million-and-a-half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza on Saturday. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”

Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan, saying, “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’” He said he would also like Egypt to take in more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

He said Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long-term.”

It was unclear from Trump’s comments if he was suggesting that all people in Gaza leave. The enclave has a population of about 2 million.

The suggestion by Trump was rejected Sunday by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.

“The Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured death and destruction over 15 months in one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 21st century, simply to stay on their land and homeland,” said Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, referring to the war that started with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “Therefore, they will not accept any proposals or solutions, even if seemingly well-intentioned under the guise of reconstruction, as proposed by U.S. President Trump.”

But the idea appeared to be welcomed by hard-line Israeli politicians.

Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a statement on the social platform X on Sunday that seemed to refer to Trump’s comments, although he did not mention the U.S. president.

“After 76 years in which most of the population of Gaza was held by force under harsh conditions to maintain the ambition to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of helping them find other places to start a new, good life is a great idea,” he said.

Smotrich has long advocated for helping Gaza residents who want to leave to depart and for the Israeli military to remain in the enclave to help pave the way for eventual Jewish settlement there.

Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while others now live in other Arab countries — including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — and around the world. But Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected any further resettlement outside Palestinian territories, saying that forcing Palestinians to leave would mean erasing any hope of a future Palestinian state. Without land, they say, there is no country.

Virtually all Egyptians and Jordanians fervently support Palestinian aspirations for statehood, making it unlikely that either government would consent to such arrangement.

The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said in a news conference Sunday that Jordan’s “rejection of displacement is fixed and unchangeable,” according to Sky News Arabia, in what appeared to be a reference to Trump’s remarks. He added: “Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

There was no public response to Trump’s suggestion from Egypt on Sunday.

“This would be going against its base completely,” Maged Mandour, an Egyptian political analyst, said of the prospects of Egypt taking in large numbers of Palestinians. “It’s just a nonstarter.”

Egypt also fears that the arrival of large numbers of Palestinians could threaten the country’s security. In particular, Cairo has long been concerned that embittered, impoverished Palestinian refugees, if allowed into Egypt, could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, drawing Israeli retaliation.

Early in the war, Egypt became so concerned about the prospect of any move that would send Gaza residents spilling into its territory that it warned Israel that it was jeopardizing the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.

Jordan is home to many Palestinians and many Jordanians of Palestinian descent. Accepting refugees from Gaza would risk destabilizing a population that has never resolved tensions stemming from the original influx of Palestinians, analysts say.

It is unclear whether Trump’s comment signals a change in U.S. policy toward Palestinians.

Under President Joe Biden and other recent presidents other than Trump, the United States officially supported establishing a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, criticized Israeli extremist attempts at seizing more Palestinian land by building settlements on it, and assured Egypt and Jordan that they would not be forced to take in more Palestinians.

But with Trump’s return to the White House, all assumptions that had undergirded U.S. relationships in the Middle East may now be upended.

Egypt and Jordan are both major U.S. partners in the region, and successive U.S. administrations have regarded their stability as crucial to that of the wider Middle East. They both receive significant U.S. funding, with Egypt the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.