Libya is working to deport Palestinians to the Gaza Strip, via Egypt, to avoid their permanent settlement in Libya, a newspaper report said Tuesday.Sounds reasonable to me. Nobody needs that stuff, except maybe Hamas.
Libya's official al-Jamahiriya daily said Tripoli intended to expel the Palestinians on its territory to abort "the conspiracy of liquidating the Palestinian cause and giving up the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes in return for Israel's acceptance of the Beirut initiative."
Ummm... That makes sense. I guess. If you look at being deported to Gaza as the perhaps forcible excercise of your Right of Return™.
The initiative is a Saudi-proposed peace plan endorsed at the Arab summit in Beirut in 2002 calls for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it captured in 1967 in return for full Arab peace and normalization with the Jewish state. Libya said it will boycott the Arab summit in Riyadh later this month amid unconfirmed reports the Arabs might amend the Arab initiative by removing an article that calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their original homes which they were forced to flee in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. The newspaper said such a deal was aimed at "settling every Palestinian in the diaspora in the countries where they reside."
Hence Muammar dumps them, thereby not having to regard them as citizens.
There are more than 4.5 million registered Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1995, Libya expelled thousands of Palestinians to protest the 1993 interim Palestinian-Israeli Oslo peace accords.
So what's he got left? A couple dozen?
The newspaper said the Libyan authorities will facilitate the return of Palestinians to the Gaza Strip through Egypt to "protect their identity." The paper also urged Lebanon and Syria to allow more than 1.5 million Palestinian refugees they host to "return to Palestine and abort this conspiracy."