Donald Trump came under fire from US President Joe Biden and some of his Republican rivals on Thursday for calling Hezbollah, Israel’s black shadow and Hamas ally, “very intelligent.”
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“You know, Hezbollah is very intelligent, they are all very intelligent,” the former president, a 2024 presidential candidate, said during a campaign rally in Florida on Wednesday evening.
A way to criticize the foreign policy of his rival, President Joe Biden, whose victory in the 2020 election he has never acknowledged.
He said the Hamas offensive would not have happened if he had remained in the White House.
“No one would have even dreamed of venturing into Israel if the election had not been stolen,” the Republican said without evidence.
Joe Biden sharply criticized comments from Donald Trump, against whom he could run in the 2024 presidential election, saying it was “never appropriate to praise terrorists who want to destroy Israel.”
“It is absurd that anyone, especially a presidential candidate (…), would praise Hezbollah terrorists by calling them ‘very intelligent,'” added Ron DeSantis, candidate in the Republican primary against Donald Trump.
Lebanon’s all-powerful pro-Iranian Hezbollah has claimed responsibility for several attacks on Israeli positions since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
The number of deaths in this conflict is now in the thousands, triggered by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s deadly offensive on Israeli territory on Saturday.
Donald Trump had already thrown a wrench in the pond, pointing to the division of the American political class on diplomatic issues and calling Vladimir Putin’s strategy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 “brilliant.”