US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Israel late on Saturday on his first trip to the Middle East, after a widely condemned proposal by President Donald Trump to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Trump first floated the suggestion that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza on 25 January, a proposal they have strongly rejected.
In a shock announcement on 4 February, after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, Trump proposed displacing Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians and the US taking control and ownership of the demolished enclave, redeveloping it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
On 10 February, he said Palestinians would not have the right of return to Gaza under his plan, contradicting his own officials who had suggested Gazans would only be relocated temporarily.
The US president’s comments echoed long-standing Palestinian fears of being permanently driven from their homes and were labeled as a proposal of ethnic cleansing by some critics.
US ally Israel’s military assault on Gaza, now paused by a fragile ceasefire, has killed more than 48,200 Palestinians in the last 16 months, the Gaza health ministry says, and provoked accusations of genocide and war crimes.
The assault internally displaced nearly all of Gaza’s population and caused a hunger crisis.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7, 2023, when Palestinian Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking some 250 hostages, Israeli tallies show.
Rubio will discuss Gaza and the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel during the trip, and will pursue Trump’s approach of trying to disrupt the status quo in the region, a State Department official said last week.
After holding talks in Israel on Sunday, Rubio will travel to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
(Reuters)
