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Sisi Urges Gaza Reconstruction Without 'Displacing Palestinians'

A Palestinian woman collects laundry outside her shelter, set up near the rubble of her house, on a rainy day, amid a ceasefire fire between Israel and Hamas, in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip February 11, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
A Palestinian woman collects laundry outside her shelter, set up near the rubble of her house, on a rainy day, amid a ceasefire fire between Israel and Hamas, in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip February 11, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
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Sisi Urges Gaza Reconstruction Without 'Displacing Palestinians'

A Palestinian woman collects laundry outside her shelter, set up near the rubble of her house, on a rainy day, amid a ceasefire fire between Israel and Hamas, in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip February 11, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
A Palestinian woman collects laundry outside her shelter, set up near the rubble of her house, on a rainy day, amid a ceasefire fire between Israel and Hamas, in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip February 11, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged on Tuesday the reconstruction of Gaza "without displacing Palestinians,” after US President Donald Trump said he could "conceivably" halt aid to Egypt and Jordan if they refuse to take in Gazans.

During a phone call with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Sisi "stressed the necessity of starting the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip... without displacing Palestinians and in a way that ensures the preservation of their rights... to live on their land,” according to a statement from his office.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday that Arab states rejected Trump's widely condemned plan to displace Palestinians in Gaza and take control of the enclave.
Egypt's foreign ministry said Abdelatty, in a meeting in Washington, stressed the importance of expediting Gaza's reconstruction while Palestinians remained there.

Trump first suggested on January 25 that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza. In the days ahead, he proposed a US takeover of Gaza and a potential permanent displacement of Palestinians from the enclave with no right of return.
Trump's comments echoed long-standing Palestinian fears of being permanently driven from their homes and have been labeled by rights advocates and the United Nations as a proposal of ethnic cleansing.

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Arab World

Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.