Marco Rubio arrives in Israel on first trip to Middle East as U.S. secretary of state

(Reuters) - U.S. 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 displace Palestinians in Gaza.

Trump first floated the suggestion that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza on January 25, a proposal they strongly opposed.

In a shock announcement on February 4, after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, Trump proposed resettling Gaza's 2.2 million Palestinians and the U.S. taking control and ownership of the demolished seaside enclave, redeveloping it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

On February 10, 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 U.S. 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.

U.S. ally Israel's military assault on Gaza, now paused by a fragile ceasefire, has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians in the last 16 months, the Gaza health ministry says, and provoked accusations of genocide and war crimes that Israel denies.

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.

(Reporting by Enas Alashray; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)