Boris Johnson has joked that Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home would be an “absolutely fantastic place” to resettle Gazans.
Last week, president Trump sparked fury after suggesting the USA could take control of Gaza and that its citizens could “permanently resettled” in other countries.
The Republican suggested the US could “develop” the land if “it’s necessary.”
Many said the comments amounted to Trump effectively calling for ethnic cleansing, and his words were widely condemned by much of the international community.
Now, Boris Johnson has also ruled out a resettling of Palestinians from their homeland, by joking about Trump’s Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago, the Daily Beast reports.
Speaking before a conference in Dubai on Wednesday, the former prime minister said: “I actually happened to be giving a speech in Florida the other day and I looked at the beach at Mar-a-Lago and I thought: ‘This is absolutely a fantastic place if you wanted to resettle millions of people from the Middle East, absolutely beautiful.’
“It’s not gonna happen because somebody else owns it. And Gaza is in, in law, owned and occupied by people who have a right to be there.”
However, the former Tory leader, who attended Trump’s inauguration last month, said he was “sympathetic” to many of the president’s policies and considers him capable of “strong leadership.”
Johnson suggested Trump’s comments on Gaza could be designed to get people to reconsider the future of the Palestinian region, which has been levelled by 15 months of near-constant bombardment from Israel following the October 7 Hamas attacks.
“It’s not for me to try to analyze what the president is saying,” Johnson told the audience. “But I think he’s inviting everybody to say, ‘Look, this place plainly does have great potential. It does have a wonderful location.’”
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