Palestinians “must be allowed home”, Keir Starmer has said in the wake of Donald Trump’s proposal to remove people from the Gaza Strip and put the territory under US control.

The prime minister told the Commons during prime minister’s questions that Palestinians “must be allowed to rebuild and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution”.

His comments come after the US president suggested the “Riviera of the Middle East” could be created and said he did not think “people should be going back” to Gaza. Trump’s idea has been widely condemned as ethnic cleansing, given it would be a breach of international law.

While Starmer did not directly criticise the US president’s plan, he said: “The most important issue on the ceasefire is obviously it’s sustained, we see it through the phases, and that means that the remaining hostages come out, and the aid that’s desperately needed gets into Gaza at speed and at the volumes that are needed.

“I have from the last few weeks two images fixed in my mind. The first is the image of Emily Damari reunited with her mother, which I found extremely moving. The second was the image of thousands of Palestinians walking, literally walking, through the rubble to try to find their homes and their communities in Gaza. They must be allowed home. They must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution.”

Starmer was responding to a question from the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, who asked for reassurance that the “concerns on these dangerous statements from the president will be communicated to the White House directly and firmly”.

Davey told Starmer: “Many of us were alarmed to hear President Trump speak about forcibly displacing 1.8 million people from Gaza.”

He added: “I’m glad that the foreign secretary has confirmed that the government’s position is still a two-state solution, I think that has support on all sides of the house, but will he reassure the house that this position and our concerns on these dangerous statements from the president will be communicated to the White House directly and firmly?”

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It came shortly after the foreign secretary also made clear that the UK did not agree with Trump’s proposal, although David Lammy began his response to a question at a press conference by praising the US president for wanting to rebuild Gaza.

“Donald Trump is right,” Lammy said at a press conference in Kyiv, during a visit to Ukraine. “Looking at those scenes, Palestinians who have been horrendously displaced over so many months of war, it is clear that Gaza is lying in rubble.”

But he added: “We have always been clear in our view that we must see two states and we must see Palestinians able to live and prosper in their homelands in Gaza, in the West Bank. That is what we want to get to.”

Lammy’s comments emphasised the difficult position faced not only by the UK government but also by the leaders of other US allies: how to avoid offending a tariff-happy American president while making plain they could not support such an idea.

Trump, speaking on Tuesday evening at a joint press conference at the White House with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declined to rule out sending US troops to make his plans in Gaza happen.

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president said. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”

Saying Palestinians could live out their lives in “peace and harmony” elsewhere, Trump added: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site.”

• Gaza
• Palestinian territories
• Donald Trump
• Foreign policy
• Keir Starmer
• David Lammy
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