ROME: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Monday she does not believe Donald Trump has a "defined plan" to move Palestinians out of Gaza, but said she welcomed a debate on the territory's reconstruction.
The US president said on Saturday that he wanted Jordan and Egypt to take people from from Gaza, suggesting "we just clean out that whole thing" -- an idea quickly rejected by Palestinian leaders, the Arab League, Jordan and Egypt.
Meloni, who attended Trump's inauguration and hopes to position herself as a bridge between the US administration and the European Union, said it was "complex".
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"Trump is right when he says that the reconstruction of Gaza is obviously one of the main challenges we face, and that to succeed, however, a great deal of involvement from the international community is needed," she told reporters during a visit to Saudi Arabia.
"As for the issue of refugees, I don't think, here again, that we are faced with a defined plan. I think we are rather faced with discussions with regional actors, who certainly need to be involved in this," she said.
Most of Gaza's 2.4 million people have been displaced, often multiple times, by the Israel-Hamas war that began with Hamas's attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Trump said the war-battered territory had become a "demolition site", adding that "over the centuries it's had many, many conflicts that site. And I don't know, something has to happen."
He said moving Gaza's inhabitants could be "temporarily or could be long term".
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark historical memories of what the Arab world calls the "Nakba" or catastrophe -- the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel's creation 75 years ago.
Meloni warned of the "significant impact" of Syrian refugees in several countries in the region, which "is not helping stabilisation".
"These are certainly very complex matters, but the fact that they are being discussed, even at an informal level with the actors in the region, in my opinion means that we want to work seriously on the issue of the reconstruction of Gaza," she said.
The Italian prime minister spoke to reporters during a trip to Saudi Arabia, where the two countries signed cooperation and industrial agreements worth around $10 billion (9.53 billion euros).
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