Trump says he’s visited Gaza, but no record of such a trip exists

Donald Trump suggested in a radio interview Monday that he had visited the war-torn Gaza Strip 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 Trump has visited Israel.

Trump made the initial comment in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that was broadcast 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 Trump ever being in Gaza, during his time as president or as a businessperson. In 2017, his first year in office, 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, Hewitt asked Trump, a real-estate developer, if Gaza, wide swathes of which have been destroyed over the past 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?”

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 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.”

The comment renews questions about how Trump would approach the region if he wins another term. Some in Israel, including hard-liners in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, favor the idea of reoccupying and annexing Gaza.

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 US 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 Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David M Friedman, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

But 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,” Trump told 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.”