US President Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday that the United States has the authority to "take" Gaza and that other countries in the region will absorb the Palestinians currently living there, speaking as he sat next to Jordan's King Abdullah II in his Oval Office.

"We're going to take Gaza. It's a war-torn area. We're going to take it. We're going to keep it. We're going to cherish it," Trump said in an offhanded, unrealistic way.

The remarks — made in an impromptu, unscheduled meeting with reporters at the start of a bilateral meeting between the two leaders — were a new form of pressure on King Abdullah II. The Jordanian king sought to hail Trump as a force for peace in the region while avoiding comment on an unfinished proposal that the US president has repeatedly floated in the past week.

Their meeting, attended by Jordan's Crown Prince Hussein, came a week after Trump announced, in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that he wanted the United States to take control of Gaza and wanted Jordan and Egypt to resettle nearly two million Palestinians who would be displaced.

Both Jordan and Egypt rejected the idea when Trump raised it last week at a news conference with Netanyahu. But on Tuesday, his guest, King Abdullah, largely objected to Trump’s ideas when reporters asked him about the possibility of forcibly removing Gazans to allow the United States to take over the territory.

Rather than respond to Mr. Trump’s proposal, King Abdullah said the two countries should consult with other Arab countries, including Egypt.

"I think the point is how do we make this work in a way that works for everyone," King Abdullah said. "Clearly we have to look at the best interests of the United States, the people of the region, and particularly my people in Jordan."

The meeting with King Abdullah was a pivotal moment not only for one of America’s most important allies in the Middle East, but more broadly for the future of Gaza and the nearly two million Palestinians who call it home. The talks coincided with the possibility of a collapse of the ceasefire, after Trump said that starting at noon Saturday, “the gates of hell will open in Gaza if Hamas does not release the hostages.” Netanyahu warned Hamas (also on Tuesday) that if the hostages were not released by noon Saturday, the Israeli military would resume “heavy fighting.”

Hamas, in turn, accused Israel of breaking its promise to send hundreds of thousands of tents to Gaza, a claim that three Israeli officials and two mediators said was true. However, the Israeli military unit overseeing the aid delivery said Hamas’s allegations were “completely false.”

In recent days, Trump has stuck to his unlikely proposal to permanently resettle most of the Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt, while the United States would hand over control of the area to Israel and then redevelop it as a jobs and tourism hub. Trump has been privately talking about the idea of U.S. control of Gaza for several weeks, according to leaks from U.S. officials to the American press.

Officials in both Jordan and Egypt have rejected the forced displacement of Gazans, which experts say would amount to a violation of international law and ethnic cleansing. However, Trump ratcheted up pressure on Egypt and Jordan on the eve of King Abdullah’s visit when he said he might cut off aid to Jordan unless it accepted the Palestinians.

U.S. aid to Jordan, including military aid, is currently frozen as part of Trump’s freeze on foreign aid around the world. However, King Abdullah now faces the difficult task of trying to protect the more than $1.5 billion in foreign aid Jordan receives from the United States while also trying to persuade Trump to back off his demands for the mass expulsion of Palestinians.

The American media frequently repeats that more than half of Jordan’s 12 million people are of Palestinian origin. Jordan is already home to about 700,000 refugees, most of them Syrians who fled that country’s civil war. Analysts say the monarchy is concerned that accepting another two million refugees could inflame tensions between citizens of Palestinian origin and those who are not.

Last week, the Jordanian parliament introduced a bill that would ban the resettlement of Palestinians in the country.

According to what Al-Quds learned from a reliable source on Tuesday, King Abdullah warned Trump that his idea of resettlement would destabilize the Middle East, endanger peace between Jordan and Israel, and even threaten the stability of the kingdom.