Morning Note

Donald Trump chastised the Israeli government over its ethnic cleansing campaign in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, arguing that Syria should take Israel’s place in the fight against Hezbollah because the Israelis constantly slaughter innocent people.

“You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses,” the president said of the IDF’s killing campaigns. “And they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”

“I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon… It just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal, and that’s the deal with Iran,” he added.

Trump then remarked that Syria would be more effective in combating Hezbollah, saying the country’s leader differs from Israel because he could do the job “without killing everyone else.”

Think about the gravity of that statement. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is a former al-Qaeda leader, but the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history believes even he would have more care for civilian lives than Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

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