South Sudan says it won’t accept Gaza refugees

South Sudan’s government denied on Wednesday that it’s talking with Israel over a plan to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to the East African nation.

According to media reports, the transfer from the Palestinian enclave to South Sudan would be part of a wider effort on Jerusalem’s part to encourage mass migration from war-torn Gaza, which is in ruins amid Israel’s war with Hamas.

“These claims are baseless and do not reflect the official position or policy of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan,” according to a statement from the country’s Foreign Ministry.

Israel was one of the first countries to recognize South Sudan when it declared independence in 2011 and, last month, hosted its foreign minister, Monday Semaya Kumba, during an official visit to Israel and the West Bank.

Despite its oil wealth, South Sudan is struggling to recover from two decades of civil war that killed at least 2 million people from the fighting, famine and disease. A resettlement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip could be part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to move civilians out of the way of a possible Israeli ground invasion.

“I think that the right thing to do, even according to the laws of war as I know them, is to allow the population to leave, and then you go in with all your might against the enemy who remains there,” Mr. Netanyahu said this week in an interview on Israeli TV.

The Associated Press cited in a Tuesday report six sources familiar with the talks who confirmed that Israel and officials in South Sudan were negotiating a potential voluntary resettlement of Palestinians to the African nation.

Palestinians, rights groups, and much of the international community rejected the proposals as a blueprint for forcible expulsion in violation of international law.

For South Sudan, such a deal could help it build closer ties to Israel, now the almost unchallenged military power in the Middle East. It is also a potential inroad to the Trump administration.

South Sudan wants the Trump administration to lift a travel ban on the country and remove sanctions from some South Sudanese elites, said Szlavik. It has already accepted eight individuals swept up in the administration’s mass deportations, in what may have been an effort to curry favor.

Many Palestinians might want to leave Gaza, at least temporarily, to escape the war and a hunger crisis bordering on famine. But they have roundly rejected any permanent resettlement from what they see as an integral part of their national homeland.

They fear that Israel will never allow them to return, and that a mass departure would allow it to annex Gaza and reestablish Jewish settlements there, as called for by far-right ministers in the Israeli government.

Still, even those Palestinians who want to leave are unlikely to take their chances in South Sudan, among the world’s most unstable and conflict-ridden countries.

Palestinians in particular could find themselves unwelcome. The long war for independence from Sudan pitted the mostly Christian and animist south against the predominantly Arab and Muslim north.