Jared Kushner says Israel should move Palestinians out of Gaza ‘waterfront property’ to desert

Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former foreign policy adviser Jared Kushner sparked a backlash by claiming that Israel should «clean up» Gaza and move Palestinians to theIsraeli Negev desert.

"Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods," Mr Kushner, who is a former property dealer married to Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka, said in an interview last month at Harvard University.

«If you think about all themoney that's gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done,» Mr Kushner told Harvard professor Tarek Masoud.

The interview was posted on the YouTube channel of the Middle East Initiative, a programme of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Mr Kushner was appointed as a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr Trump when his father-in-law served as the 45th US president. He was tasked with preparing a peace plan for the Middle East which reportedly involved striking normalisation deals with Gulf nations.

Mr Kushner made the statement at the height of Israel's war against Hamas militants in Gaza, which has forced about 1.5 million Palestinians to flee from the north of the Strip to the southern town of Rafah.

Palestinians line up for free food in Rafah, Gaza Strip

More than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, 40 per cent of them children, and 70,000 have sustained injuries in Israel's incessant retaliatory bombing of the Strip. Israel declared war on Hamas following the militant group’s 7 October attack in southern Israel where at least 1,200 civilians were killed and 253 abducted as hostages.

Mr Kushner suggested Israel should move Palestinians from Gaza to the