The Trump administration and Israel approached the governments of Sudan and Somalia, and have also been interested in Syria, as potential places to resettle Palestinians from Gaza, according to three sources familiar with the effort.

The idea of Palestinian resettlement in another country is one of several options the Trump team is chewing over as part of the U.S. president’s larger goal of ending Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza and rebuilding the devastated Palestinian enclave. 

“Nobody is expelling any Palestinians,” President Trump said Wednesday, when the Irish Prime Minister was asked during the two leaders’ Oval Office meeting by a Voice of America reporter about the president’s controversial remarks in February when he suggested taking ownership of Gaza to rebuild it.

Mr. Trump made the remarks during a Feb. 4 press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying Gaza could be the “Riviera of the Middle East.“

“ We should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this, and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction,” Mr. Trump said. 

A combination of Israeli and U.S. officials communicated to Sudan and Somalia, two diplomatic sources confirmed to CBS News. Senior far-right Israeli government officials have already been calling for Palestinians to migrate from the enclave. Mr. Trump’s remarks have only emboldened Israel to reach out to other countries to explore opportunities for Palestinian resettlement, one source said. 

Three sources familiar with Mr. Trump’s idea of resettling Gazans to another country told CBS News that his administration and Israel have also been interested in Syria. One source familiar with the Trump administration’s Middle East policy said that the administration has attempted outreach to Syria’s new interim government via a third-party interlocutor. Another source from the region told CBS News that Syria’s government had been approached, but it was unclear whether there had been any response from Syria to the outreach. 

A senior Syrian official told CBS News that they are unaware of any outreach to their government by Israel or the U.S. about resettlement of Gazans.

Dahir Hassan, Somalia’s ambassador to the U.S., told CBS News that “neither the U.S. administration nor Israeli authorities have approached the Somali government regarding any proposed relocation of Palestinians to Somalia.” Hassan also cited concern that “the dissemination of such unverified information risks fueling recruitment propaganda for extremist groups like ISIS and Al-Shabaab, potentially exacerbating security challenges in the region.”

The Sudanese government has not responded to a CBS News’ request for comment.

Syria’s fledgling interim government is just three months old, after toppling Bashar al-Assad and his brutal regime which held an iron fist over the Syrian people for decades. The Arab northeast African nation of Sudan is currently embroiled in civil war and a refugee crisis while suffering pockets of famine. Tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees have sought asylum in Israel over the last two decades, only to be detained in the country’s desert-based detention centers or left to live without any formal status. The East African country of Somalia is a fragile, formerly failed state where the militant Islamist group Al-Shabaab continues to wage a deadly insurgency. 

Since his Feb. 4 news conference, Mr. Trump has suggested Palestinians would have a choice on whether to leave but also indicated that their departure from Gaza could be permanent. In a Fox News interview several days later he said, “We’ll build beautiful communities, safe communities, could be five, six, could be two. But we’ll build safe communities a little bit away from where they (the Palestinians) are.” In the same interview, he said that Palestinians wouldn’t have the right to return to Gaza under his plan because the enclave “is not habitable” and won’t be for years to come. 

The United Nations reported in January that over 90% of housing units in Gaza are either damaged or destroyed and 1.9 million Gazan civilians have been displaced. Gaza’s health ministry says more than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas, which began after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in which Hamas killed more than 1,000 Israelis and took roughly 100 more hostage.

Multiple Arab governments, the United Nations and some Democratic lawmakers, quickly denounced Mr. Trump’s idea of emptying out Gaza with some defining the idea as ethnic cleansing. Instead, Arab leaders endorsed an alternative Egyptian post-war construction plan for Gaza last week, but the Trump administration and Israel were both quick to reject it, again citing that the Gaza Strip is uninhabitable. 

Former President Joe Biden’s administration had been sending U.S. officials on a regular basis to meet with the new Syrian government in Damascus in the lead-up to Mr. Trump’s inauguration when the visits stopped.  Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was quick to condemn Mr. Trump’s remarks in February, saying that the U.S. president’s plan “is a serious crime that will ultimately fail“. It is unclear what the Trump administration’s overall policy toward the new Syrian government will be. 

“The Trump administration should engage directly with the new government in Damascus, particularly after the agreement between Damascus and the SDF (the U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces). And to ensure that Iran never again gains a foothold in Syria, for the true, enduring defeat of ISIS, and to conduct a full withdrawal of U.S. forces in the right way unlike what unfolded in Afghanistan,” Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy and humanitarian organization Syrian Emergency Task Force, told CBS News. 

Israel has conducted widespread airstrikes in Syria since December, on what it described as Assad regime weapons sites, and seized territory in the buffer zone between both countries. This past week, Israel struck inside a Damascus suburb, saying it was taking out the headquarters of the Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed militant group that has a substantial foothold in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

A State Department spokesperson deferred to the Israeli government, and told CBS News that Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff “continues to work tirelessly towards either an extension of Phase One (of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement) or an advance to Phase Two with these principles in mind”.

The State Department also referred to remarks by Witkoff from a February Fox News interview in which he said, “We need to explore new policy prescriptions that ultimately end up in a better life for Gazans and Palestinians.” 

Witkoff also suggested in the same Fox interview that Gaza’s entire Palestinian population could go to other Middle East-based Arab nations and other countries beyond the region: “I think that the president’s solution is: how do we address where two million people can go? And I think the obvious answers are: in some respects, Egypt, in some respects, Jordan; but in some respects other countries who have called us up and voluntarily said this is a humanitarian effort, we want to help you”.

Asked by “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan on Sunday about whether the Trump administration is talking to other countries about relocation of two million Palestinians in Gaza, Witkoff said again “I think we’re exploring, Margaret, all alternatives and options that lead to a better life for Gazans. And, by the way, for the people of Israel. So we’re exploring all of those things.”

Millions of displaced Palestinians already live in surrounding Arab countries as refugees, including in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. Far-right Israeli ministers have increasingly called for moving Palestinians in Gaza and also in the West Bank off their land as part of the extreme view it would fulfill a Biblical claim by Jews to the land, and increase Israel’s security.

The Israeli government, the White House and its National Security Council all declined to respond to multiple CBS News requests for comment. 

Trump’s son-in-law and former advisor Jared Kushner first suggested that Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods” during an on-camera discussion at Harvard University in February 2024.

The Associated Press was the first to report Friday that the U.S. and Israel had contacted Sudan, Somalia, and also Somaliland, about resettling Palestinians from Gaza. 

contributed to this report.