RAMALLAH, West Bank — A senior Palestinian official and confidant to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says that the PA will cut ties with the US if President Donald Trump advances his proposal to take over the Gaza Strip and relocate all of its residents.

In an interview with The Times of Israel from his Ramallah office last week, Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Council member Ahmed Majdalani said implementation of Trump’s proposal would amount to the “expulsion” of Gaza’s roughly 2 million residents, thereby posing an “existential threat” to the Palestinian cause.

Pressed repeatedly as to whether such fervent opposition to the proposal meant the PA was prepared to sever ties with Washington again, Majdalani’s response was the same each time: “Of course.”

“Why would we have ties if Mr. Trump sticks to this proposal?” he said.

The longtime PA minister clarified that Ramallah is prepared to work with Trump if he abandons the idea. He also pointed to comments from top aides to the US president who have softened the proposal and suggested they would be open to shelving it if Arab allies came up with an alternative plan for the post-war management of Gaza that removed Hamas from power.

But the plan unveiled on Tuesday didn’t explicitly address this concern, and the White House quickly came out against it, saying it was sticking with Trump’s original proposal.

“We have been listening to Mr. Trump’s advisers who have explicitly said that this is just a proposal — not an obligatory plan of action,” said Majdalani in a rare on-record interview with Israeli media by a Palestinian official.

Still, the fact that he was willing to even entertain publicly the idea of ending ties with the US, just over a month into Trump’s second tenure, highlighted how alarmed Ramallah was by the president’s talk of taking over Gaza.

The PA gradually cut ties with the US during Trump’s first term, when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and proposed a peace plan that........

© The Times of Israel