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    Why Trump’s Plan to Relocate Gazans Is Untenable for Jordan

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    President Trump’s plan would send a huge number of refugees to Jordan, adding new frictions to the kingdom’s often tense, sometimes violent history with displaced Palestinians.President Trump’s proposal that the United States take over the Gaza Strip while other countries take in the Palestinians who live there is a deal King Abdullah II of Jordan cannot make.The monarch rebuffed Mr. Trump gently, telling him at the White House on Tuesday that the American president was essential to peace in the Middle East and pledging that Jordan would host more Palestinians in need of medical care. And the approach seemed to convince Mr. Trump to walk back threats made before the visit about withdrawing aid to Jordan if it rejected his plan.Still, the notion has laid bare dilemmas for King Abdullah, whose family — and the land they have ruled for generations — has a complex relationship with Palestinians that has at times turned violent.Here’s what to know about the president’s plan and the history informing the king’s rejection.Here’s what you need to know:What is the plan?Why is the plan problematic for Jordan?What has been Jordan’s relationship to Palestinians?When did Jordan clash with Palestinians?Are there personal concerns for the king?What is the plan?The Tel al-Zaatar area east of Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Thursday.Saher Alghorra for The New York TimesThe president’s proposal is vague and came as a surprise to even his advisers when he presented it last week. Mr. Trump has not been consistent or clear about what it entails except insofar as his plan certainly appears to rely on Jordan and Egypt, among others, accepting a huge influx of Palestinian refugees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A History of Israel’s Previous Invasions of Lebanon

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      Israel has invaded Lebanon three times before. On each occasion, it said its aim was to secure its northern frontier and stop militants from launching attacks across the border. And each time, the invasion had unforeseen consequences and achieved less decisive results than Israel’s military planners and political leaders anticipated.The invasions helped fuel the destabilization of Lebanon, a country whose myriad religious sects, including Shia and Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze, fought a 15-year civil war that drew in Syria and caused huge destruction before it ended in 1990. Lebanon has suffered from shaky governments, occasional violence and political assassinations. It currently faces a debilitating economic crisis.“The invasions served to widen the wedge between Lebanon’s political communities, and as they are linked to the country’s sects this has only worsened sectarian tension and fueled the country’s political divisions,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization.As Israel invades for a fourth time, here is a brief look at the history of its previous invasions.1978: Three-Month InvasionIsrael invaded southern Lebanon in March 1978, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, partly in response to an attack by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon who landed by sea and commandeered a bus on a coastal road north of Tel Aviv, leaving 35 Israelis and an American dead. Israeli forces captured territory up to the Litani River, a few miles from Israel’s northern border.Israel withdrew in June, handing control of the ground it had taken to a Lebanese Christian militia and a United Nations peacekeeping force that had been established under a United Nations Security Council resolution. Lebanese officials said 1,200 people died in the invasion. Israel said it had killed 350 Palestinian militants and lost 34 of its own soldiers.The invasion did not solve Israel’s security problems on its northern border and some critics of Mr. Begin argued that Israel had squandered international goodwill by devastating a string of villages in southern Lebanon. Other commentators noted that Arab leaders, despite voluble rhetoric, provided little practical or military assistance to the Palestinians during the fighting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

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      The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More