The former president told an Israeli news outlet that images of destruction in Gaza were harming the country: “You’re losing a lot of the world.”
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A group searching in the rubble of a damaged building northwest of Nuseirat in the Gaza Strip on Monday.
Former President Donald J. Trump, in an interview with a conservative Israeli news outlet that was published on Monday, exhorted Israel “to finish up your war,” mixing bellicose support for the government of Israel with harsh warnings that the Jewish state was losing international support by providing “a very bad picture for the world.”
But while Mr. Trump had typically harsh words for President Biden — he called Mr. Biden “dumb” — he offered no prescriptions for what the United States should do, or for what he would do, if elected, to bring the war in Gaza to an end or to advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The interview with Israel Hayom, a publication started by the conservative American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was released on the same day that the Biden administration allowed the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.
It also came as former members of Mr. Trump’s administration have become more outspoken on policies that diverge sharply from President Biden’s. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a former senior White House adviser who led the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, took heat last week for calling the war in Gaza “a little bit of an unfortunate situation,” then adding, “but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
And David M. Friedman, who was ambassador to Israel during Trump’s administration, critiqued Vice President Kamala Harris on social media over the weekend for saying as many as 1.5 million Palestinians crowded into the southern Gaza city of Rafah had nowhere to go if Israel attacks. Mr. Friedman suggested that Gaza’s Palestinians could always emigrate.
“She ‘studied the maps’ and concluded that the people in Rafah have no place to go,” Mr. Friedman wrote. “It must have been an awfully small map — obviously left out Egypt and other Arab countries.”
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Source: nytimes.com
