President Trump repeated his proposal to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, expanding on a controversial idea that was rejected by the Arab states and would represent a significant shift in U.S. policy.

After first raising the idea over the weekend, Trump elaborated on it Monday, telling reporters on Air Force One that he wants to relocate Gaza residents to “an area where they can live without disruption and revolution and violence.” Moving Palestinians from Gaza, Trump said, would “get people living in areas that are a lot safer and maybe a lot better and maybe a lot more comfortable.”

He again pushed Egypt and Jordan, which receive significant financial support from the U.S., to help with the plan.

“We helped them a lot, and I’m sure he’d help us. He’s a friend of mine,” Trump said of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi . “I think he would do it, and I think the king of Jordan would do it too.”

Egypt, Jordan, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, have all rejected the idea of relocating Palestinians. The Arab League, a group of 22 nations, said Monday the proposal would only prolong the conflict.

Arab officials from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are also discussing holding an emergency meeting for Arab states to make public their opposition to Trump’s proposal and put pressure on the U.S. president to change course, according to Arab officials familiar with the talks.

Trump said he would soon meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the conflict. Netanyahu’s office said Tuesday that Trump had extended an invitation for a Feb. 4 meeting at the White House.

The U.S. for decades has pushed for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that would exist alongside Israel. Trump, too, put forward a similar plan in his first term.

The 15-month-old war in Gaza, however, appears to be scrambling long-held U.S. ideas over how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war has displaced most of the Palestinian population of Gaza, reduced much of the enclave to rubble and raised questions about how it will be governed and rebuilt in the future.

Trump, who is working to shape his Middle East agenda and end the war, said over the weekend he wants to “clean out” the enclave and urged Amman and Cairo to take in refugees either temporarily or for the long term.

The idea appears to have been floating around his team of Middle East advisers for some time. An unnamed transition official told NBC News earlier in January that Indonesia could provide Gaza Palestinians a temporary home. Indonesia’s Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

White House officials have yet to spell out the precise parameters of the idea, including how the more than two million Palestinians in the enclave could be relocated and what their removal might mean for the prospects of a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.

Softening the idea, Trump officials suggested over the weekend that Washington and its regional partners could provide guarantees that Palestinians would eventually be allowed to return to Gaza.

Early in the war, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia rejected the idea of accepting Palestinian refugees when the notion was floated publicly by Israeli officials and in private conversations with U.S. officials, Arab officials said.

Both Egypt and Jordan fear that taking in a large number of Gazans would threaten their own security. Egyptian officials have repeatedly said militants among Palestinian refugees could launch attacks on Israel from inside the country, drawing Israeli retaliation.

More than half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin, including almost 2.4 million registered as Palestinian refugees with the United Nations. A sharp increase in their numbers would risk upending the country’s demographics and could spark instability.

“Egypt and Jordan are very much, on the one hand, dependent on the U.S., but also Israel’s relationship with those countries is really vital,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. “Putting them up against the wall like that, I don’t think, is very good for regional stability.”

The thought is particularly worrying for Gazans, who throughout the war have feared they would be permanently pushed from their homes in a dislocation like those that followed conflicts between Arabs and Israelis in 1948 and 1967, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled.

Trump’s comments have come at a delicate moment in Gaza and wider Middle East diplomacy. Egypt and Qatar worked with the U.S. to coax Israel and Hamas toward a cease-fire , and Arab states are now awaiting a U.S. road map for securing an extension of the initial 42-day halt to the fighting that went into effect on Jan. 19.

As part of the cease-fire agreement, Palestinians began moving back to the north of the strip Monday, where many found their homes destroyed and entire neighborhoods unrecognizable.

Israel and Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, are expected to soon start negotiating over a permanent end to the fighting, again under the mediation of the U.S., Egypt and Qatar. The U.S. is also seeking to maintain a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanese militia Hezbollah after the two sides engaged in fighting as a consequence of the war in Gaza.

The war was sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and 250 taken hostage. More than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed since the fighting began, according to local health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.

Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who recently negotiated the temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, is this week visiting Saudi Arabia, according to Arab officials, and is also expected to visit Israel to meet with Netanyahu.

While Israel’s far-right lawmakers have been pushing for what they call “voluntary migration” from Gaza, the Israeli government has promised to allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes once the fighting is over. The Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Foreign-policy veterans didn’t see the idea as viable but were reluctant to dismiss Trump entirely.

“One has to take it seriously, since this is the president of the United States putting something on the table,” said Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “But on the other hand, I think it’s a bit of a nothing burger.”

The objections from Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians and Hamas make the idea difficult to pursue, he said. “Hamas is still very much the dominant power in Gaza,” he said.