WASHINGTON — President Trump confirmed he plans to visit the war-torn Gaza Strip in an interview published Thursday while crediting himself as the indispensable factor in brokering the peace deal between Israel and Hamas earlier this month.
“The most important thing,” Trump told Time magazine about this month’s diplomatic breakthrough, “is they have to respect the president of the United States. The Middle East has to understand that.
“And they do. If you go to Qatar, if you go to Saudi Arabia, if you go to UAE, who are the three big ones, in that sense, they all respect the president, and if they’re not going to respect the president—it’s almost the president more so than the country. You understand that? If they don’t respect the president, and if the president doesn’t know what he’s doing, it could break apart. If they do respect the president, it’s going to be long-term beautiful peace.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the president predicted that Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords establishing diplomatic relations with Israel by the end of this year.
“They had a problem,” he said of Riyadh. “They had a Gaza problem and they had an Iran problem. Now they don’t have those two problems.”
Israel and Hamas entered a fragile cease-fire on Oct. 10, with the terror group freeing its last 20 living Israeli hostages and beginning the process of turning over more than two dozen sets of remains.
Trump did not specify when or under what conditions he would visit the Gaza Strip, but warned “nobody would mind if we went in and took [Hamas] to task” if they tried to backslide on the agreement.
To seal the deal, Trump had to convince Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve.
“Bibi, you can’t fight the world,” Trump recalled telling Netanyahu. “You can fight individual battles, but the world’s against you. And Israel is a very small place compared to the world.”
The US president was also vexed by Israel’s Sept. 9 bombing targeting Hamas political leaders in Qatar.
“That was terrible,” Trump told the magazine, calling it “a tactical mistake” by Israel.
However, the president added, “it was so out of joint that it sort of got everybody to do what they have to do. If you took that away, we might not be talking about this subject right now.”
Trump also warned that his administration won’t back any effort by Israel to annex the West Bank.
“It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” he warned. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
Trump also revealed that he personally likes Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and a bitter foe of Netanyahu.
Abbas, 89, has led the Palestinian Authority since 2005, and was present for the peace summit in Egypt earlier this month to solidify the Gaza peace deal.
Trump has long courted close ties with Netanyahu, who has pushed for him to get the Nobel Peace Prize and hailed him as the “greatest friend” Israel has ever had.
“I stopped him, because he would have just kept going,” the president said of the Israeli head of government. “It could have gone on for years. It would have gone on for years. And I stopped him, and everybody came together when I stopped, it was amazing.”
