Former President Donald Trump said Friday that President Biden should allow Israel a free hand in its operations against Hamas following the takeout of terror boss Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip earlier this week.
In his first public comments on the Middle East war since Israeli forces blew Sinwar away outside the city of Rafah, Trump accused Biden of “trying to hold back” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces
“He’s doing a good job,” the 45th president told reporters of Netanyahu after Trump arrived in Michigan for a pair of campaign events.
“Biden is trying to hold him back,” Trump, 78, went on. “Just so you understand, Biden is far superior to the VP [Kamala Harris]. He’s trying to hold him back and he probably should be doing the opposite.”
Both Harris and Biden, 81, had publicly warned Netanyahu, 74, against sending an offensive into Rafah and the area where Sinwar was found and killed.
“Any major military operation in Gaza would be a huge mistake,” Harris, 59, told ABC News’ “This Week” in an interview that aired March 24.
“I have studied the maps,” she added. “There’s nowhere for those folks to go, and we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”
On Friday, Trump told reporters: “I’m glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do” and added that the Israeli operation against Hamas was “moving along pretty good.”
Biden also celebrated Israel’s elimination of Sinwar, using it to call for a renewed pursuit of a cease-fire in the conflict.
“With our intelligence help, the IDF relentlessly pursued Hamas’s leaders, flushing them out of their hiding places and forcing them onto the run,” Biden said in a statement. “There has rarely been a military campaign like this, with Hamas leaders living and moving through hundreds of miles of tunnels, organized in multiple stories underground, determined to protect themselves with no care for the civilians suffering above ground. Today, however, proves once again that no terrorists anywhere in the world can escape justice, no matter how long it takes.”
Speaking to reporters in Berlin Thursday, Biden said Sinwar “had a lot of blood in his hands, American blood, Israeli blood and others.”
The president added he will be sending Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Israel to try again to iron out a cease-fire, release dozens of hostages still held by Hamas and determine a plan of “how do we secure Gaza.”
Trump hosted Netanyahu and his wife Sara at Mar-a-Lago in July, where the two defrosted their relationship that had deteriorated throughout 2020.
Following the Mar-a-Lago meeting, Trump expressed optimism about the state of the Middle East and predicted that if he were to win another term in office, “it’s all going to work out and very quickly.”
“If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East and maybe a Third World War,” he told reporters at the time. “You are closer to a Third World War right now than at any time since the Second World War. You’ve never been so close because you have incompetent people running our country.”
