Brandon Drenon
Reporting from Washington DC

Image source, Laila El-Haddad

“Stunned”, “appalling”, “triggering” – these are words Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian-American author and activist, used to describe her reaction to Trump’s recent Gaza comments.

“It just showed an utter sort of callous disdain and disregard for Palestinian lives and Palestinian humanity and Palestinian dignity, like it’s as though they’re just a pawn that are being played around with,” she tells me.

“He was talking about Palestinians as though, again, they existed in some vacuum, as though they had just been the unfortunate victims of some natural disaster.”

El-Hadded says she spent much of her childhood between Gaza and Saudi Arabia, and lived there again for a few years after finishing grad school – “always” longing to return.

She left Gaza after marrying another Palestinian who, unlike her, did not have the appropriate pass to cross the border into the territory from Israel.

El-Haddad says that “despite the fact that it’s besieged, destroyed, occupied, etc, it remains home”.

“Everyday this is a topic of conversation on our groups – the moment the border is open, we want to go back.”

Some of her group chats include relatives in Gaza and are “where we find out if someone has been killed or not”.

El-Haddad says she spoke to her family there this morning and that they “categorically reject” Trump’s proposition.

One told her: “Do you really think, after everything we endured, that we are going to succumb to this, that we are going to sort of willingly agree, or maybe not willingly, to be transferred from our homes?

“It is still our home, rubble or no rubble.”