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Egypt, Spain Reject US Plan to Displace Gazans

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (R) and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hold a signed agreements following their meeting at Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, 19 February 2025. (EPA)
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (R) and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hold a signed agreements following their meeting at Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, 19 February 2025. (EPA)
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Egypt, Spain Reject US Plan to Displace Gazans

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (R) and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hold a signed agreements following their meeting at Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, 19 February 2025. (EPA)
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (R) and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hold a signed agreements following their meeting at Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, 19 February 2025. (EPA)

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Wednesday rejected a controversial proposal by US President Donald Trump to displace Palestinians from the war-devastated Gaza Strip.  

The Arab League is scheduled to hold an extraordinary meeting in Cairo on March 4 in response to Trump's plan to take over Gaza and permanently move its Palestinian inhabitants elsewhere, including to Egypt and Jordan, and then redevelop the coastal territory into the "Riviera of the Middle East".  

Speaking in Madrid ahead of the gathering, Sisi called for the "international community's support and adoption of a plan to rebuild the Gaza Strip without displacing the Palestinian people -- I repeat, without displacing the Palestinian people -- from their land, which they cling to, and their homeland, which they do not agree to relinquish".

Sanchez, one of the staunchest defenders of the Palestinian cause within the European Union, agreed, saying "Gaza belongs to the Palestinians and is part of the future Palestinian state".

"Their expulsion would not only be immoral and contrary to international law and United Nations resolutions, but would also have a destabilizing effect," the Socialist premier added.  

The two leaders also signed a declaration upgrading Egypt-Spain relations to a "strategic partnership", as well as several memorandums of understanding in various fields including illegal migration and defense.  

Trump's plan sparked an outcry from Arab governments as well as from world leaders, and the United Nations warned against "ethnic cleansing" in the Palestinian territory.

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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)
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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.