Trump Says He’s Visited Gaza, but No Record of Such a Trip Exists

By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-08 00:17:44 | Updated at 2024-10-08 02:50:37 2 hours ago

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An aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, pointed to the former president’s trip to Israel. But Gaza is not in Israel.

Donald Trump stands with a thumbs-up sign surrounded by a number of Hasidic Jews at the Ohel Chabad Lubavitch Center.

Oct. 7, 2024, 8:10 p.m. ET

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.

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Mr. Trump at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem in 2017.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

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?”

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