US: Marco Rubio denies purported plan to deport Gazans to Libya

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has denied reports that Washington is planning to deport Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, Anadolu Agency reported on May 2oth.

“There’s no deportation,” Rubio said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 20th. He said: “What we have talked to some nations about is if someone voluntarily and willingly says, ‘I want to go somewhere else’.”

Rubio described the proposal as a temporary humanitarian measure, not a resettlement scheme. He said: “They may want to come back, they may want to live there in the future, but right now, they can’t,” he said. He framed the plan as “a bridge towards reconstruction.”

He added that the US had approached certain countries in the region to ask whether they would accept displaced Gazans on a temporary basis. He said he did not know of any talks involving Libya.

Arab leaders meeting in Baghdad on May 17th pledged to support reconstruction efforts once the war ends, The Associated Press reported.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani declared $20 million in Iraqi funding towards Gaza’s reconstruction, alongside a near equal amount for Lebanon.

They expanded on previous emergency Arab League talks in Cairo, which promoted rebuilding Gaza without uprooting its population of roughly two million.

The US Embassy in Libya echoed that stance on May 18th, calling claims about relocating Palestinians to Libya were “completely baseless.”

Their comments follow a May 16th report by NBC News, which indicated the Trump administration had thought about relocating up to one million Palestinians to Libya in return for the unfreezing of Libyan assets.

Many human rights defenders raised the alarm over the alleged US-Libya deportation deal, Middle East Eye reported on May 2nd. David Yambio is a Sudanese survivor of Libya’s detention system and co-founder of Refugees in Libya. He said the proposal is “dangerous, unacceptable and inhuman,” referring to Libya’s long record of abuse against migrants and refugees.

Anadolu Agency, The Associated Press, Middle East Eye