Former President Donald Trump has warned Israel to bring its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip to a rapid close, telling an Israeli paper that the Jewish state is quickly shedding international support.
Calling the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack by Hamas “one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen,” the 77-year-old Trump said Israel had “made a very big mistake” with the ferocity of its response.
“These photos and shots. I mean, moving shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza,” the former president said during an interview with Israel Hayom, owned by the family of the late casino magnate and GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
“And I said, ‘Oh, that’s a terrible portrait. It’s a very bad picture for the world,'” Trump went on. “The world is seeing this … every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people. It would say it was given by the Defense Ministry, and said whoever’s providing that — that’s a bad image.”
“You have to finish up your war … You gotta get it done,” the 45th president said. “And I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on.
“And I will say, Israel has to be very careful because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support,” Trump went on. “You have to get on to peace, to get on to a normal life for Israel, and for everybody else.”
In the same interview, however, Trump acknowledged to the Israelis that “I would act very much the same way as you did” if the US was hit by an attack similar to the Oct. 7 assault, which killed an estimated 1,200 people — including 33 American citizens.
After the interviewer noted that “terrorists are hiding in those buildings” in Gaza, Trump replied, “Go and do what you have to do. But you don’t do that.
“And I think that’s one of the reasons that there has been a lot of kickback. If people didn’t see that — every single night, I’ve watched every single one of those. And I think Israel wanted to show that it’s tough, but sometimes you shouldn’t be doing that.”
During his first term, the 45th president very publicly pursued a peace accord between the Israelis and Palestinians, an ambition he described as the “ultimate deal.”
While Trump came up short of that goal, his administration scored a different breakthrough by brokering the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
Trump has cast himself as a staunch ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and courted close ties with his counterpart during his first term.
Since then, Trump has seemingly soured on Netanyahu, grousing shortly after the deadly Hamas attack in October that he “let us down,” alluding to his gripes about the prime minister acknowledging President Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Trump told Israel Hayom that he blamed his successor for the Hamas attack because “they have no respect for him.
“He can’t put two sentences together,” the former president said of Biden. “He can’t talk. He’s a very dumb person. He’s a dumb person. His foreign policy throughout 50 years has been horrible. If you look at people that were in other administrations with him, they saw him as a weak, ineffective president. They [Hamas] would have never done that attack if I were there.”
Trump also addressed his frequent grousing about Jewish Americans who vote Democrat, including his recent remark that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”
“I think if you have to convince them, you got a problem because that should be automatic,” he told Israel Halom. “I’m not Jewish. And yet Israel for me is very important.”
The former president’s daughter, Ivanka, is a convert to Judaism, having done so in 2009 before her wedding to Jared Kushner.
The interview with Trump was published on the same day Netanyahu scrapped plans to dispatch a delegation to Washington to hash out differences over a planned military operation in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, in protest of the US abstaining from a cease-fire resolution at the UN.
Biden has warned Israel against sending troops into Rafah, where an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians have taken refuge, without a robust plan in place to protect civilians.
Netanyahu has vowed to go into Rafah regardless, noting that it is one of the last major strongholds of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.