Donald J. Trump suggested in a radio interview on Monday that he had visited war-torn Gaza in the past, a place there is no record of him visiting. When asked to clarify, a campaign aide said that Gaza is “in Israel” and that Mr. Trump has visited Israel.
Mr. Trump made the initial comment in an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that was broadcast on Monday on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and hostage-taking by Hamas, which controls Gaza.
The Gaza Strip is not part of Israel and has never been, though some Israelis have called for annexing it. It was occupied by Israel from 1967 until 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory. In 2007, after Hamas took over Gaza, Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade that restricted access to the area.
There is no record of Mr. Trump ever being in Gaza, during his time as president or as a businessman. In 2017, his first year in office, Mr. Trump visited Israel and traveled to the West Bank — a separate territory that is some 20 miles from Gaza at the nearest point — for a meeting with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in Bethlehem.
In the interview, Mr. Hewitt asked Mr. Trump, a real-estate developer, if Gaza, wide swaths of which have been destroyed over the last year as part of air and ground strikes in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack, could “be Monaco if it was rebuilt the right way? Could someone make Gaza into something that all the Palestinian people would be proud of, would want to live in, would benefit them?”
Mr. Trump replied, “It could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything. It’s got, it is the best, I’ve said it for years. You know when — I’ve been there, and it’s rough. It’s a rough place, before the, you know, before all of the attacks and before the back and forth what’s happened over the last couple of years.”
Asked later what Mr. Trump was referring to when he said he had “been there,” a Trump campaign official did not provide a comment on the record. Speaking only on the condition of anonymity, the official said, “Gaza is in Israel. President Trump has been to Israel.”
Mr. Trump has made supporting Israel a centerpiece of his campaign over the past year. His supporters have praised several policy decisions he made as president, including the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and the historic Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and some Arab nations. Those efforts were pushed by Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
But Mr. Trump has made plain that he thinks Jewish voters in the United States should support him for those and other policies.
“I think that Israel has to do one thing, they have to get smart about Trump, because they don’t back me,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Hewitt, referring to Jewish voters, when he was asked whether Israel would “recover fully” from the attacks. “I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not reciprocal, as they say, not reciprocal.”
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