Trump Claims To Have Achieved ‘Peace in the Middle East’ While Threatening to ‘Eradicate’ Hamas

During a bilateral meeting at the White House with the prime minister of Australia on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump once again falsely claimed to have achived “peace in the Middle East,” then threatened to “eradicate” Hamas if they don’t “behave” and “be nice.”

If they’re not [nice], we’re gonna go in, we’re gonna eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated… They killed some people, ya know. Pretty—a lot of people. But this is a violent group… and if they keep doing it then we’re gonna go in and straighten it out, and it’ll happen very quickly, and pretty violently, unfortunately….

Asked whether that means American boots on the ground, Trump said in part:

No, it won’t be on the ground at all. We don’t need to. Because we have many counties, as you know, signed onto this deal… I mean we’ve had countries calling me when they saw some of the killing with Hamas saying, ‘We’d love to go in and take care of the situation ourselves.’ In addition, you have—Israel would go in in two minutes if I asked them to go in. I could tell them, ‘Go in and take care of it.’ But right now we haven’t said that…

Watch:

As reported by Antiwar.com’s Dave DeCamp, Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Monday that Israeli forces have killed at least 80 Palestinians and wounded 303 since October 11, the day after the ceasefire went into effect.

“The Health Ministry said that a total of 45 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks were brought to hospitals over the previous 24-hour period,” DeCamp notes.