August 15, NAIROBI (Reuters) - According to three sources who spoke to Reuters, South Sudan and Israel are negotiating a plan to relocate Palestinians from war-torn Gaza to the unstable African country. Palestinian leaders swiftly rejected the plan as untenable.
According to the individuals, who are aware of the situation but spoke on condition of anonymity, negotiations between Israel and South Sudan are still underway and no deal has been achieved.
If the plan is implemented, it would envision people relocating from an enclave that was destroyed by nearly two years of conflict with Israel to a country in the center of Africa that has been torn apart by years of ethnic and political turmoil.
A request for comment on the information from the three sources was not immediately answered by Israel's foreign ministry or the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A U.S. State Department official responded, "we do not speak to private diplomatic conversations," when questioned about the plan and whether the U.S. was in favor of it.
Netanyahu reiterated calls this week for the voluntary evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza and stated this month that he plans to increase military authority over the region.
The idea of relocating Gaza's residents to any other nation has been rejected by Arab and international authorities. Palestinians claim that would be similar to another "Nakba" (catastrophe), similar to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, in which hundreds of thousands of people were displaced or fled.
According to the three sources, when South Sudanese Foreign Minister Monday Semaya Kumba visited the nation last month, Israeli authorities discussed the possibility of resettling Palestinians in South Sudan.
According to their account, South Sudan's foreign ministry rejected prior reports on the proposal as "baseless" on Wednesday.
On Friday, the ministry was not immediately ready to comment on the claims made by the sources.
The Associated Press, which quoted six people with knowledge of the situation, broke the story of the talks first on Tuesday.
The Palestinian leadership and people "reject any plan or idea to displace any of our people to South Sudan or to any other place," according to Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Executive Committee.
His remarks were in line with one made Thursday by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' administration. Requests for reaction from Hamas, the group battling Israel in Gaza, were not immediately answered.
During his visit to the South Sudanese city of Juba this week, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel informed reporters that relocation had not been the main topic of those talks.
When questioned if such a strategy had been discussed, she responded, "This is not what the discussions were about,"
Referring to her conversations with officials in Juba, she stated, "The discussions were about foreign policy, about multilateral organizations, about the humanitarian crisis, the real humanitarian crisis happening in South Sudan, and about the war."
Israel is in contact with a few nations to identify a place for Palestinians who wish to escape Gaza, according to Netanyahu, who met with Kumba last month. He has repeatedly refused to give more information.
