In a bizarre statement, US President Donald Trump compared the situation of Israeli hostages held by Hamas to the Holocaust.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump was asked about efforts to secure the release of 59 Israeli hostages.
Instead of addressing the question directly, he launched into a rant about what he claimed was his conversation with the freed hostages.
Trump suggested that, unlike the Nazis, Hamas showed no “sign of love” towards their captives.
“I said to them, was there any sign of love? Did they give you a meal on the side? Did they show any care?” Trump recounted, as he made an unfathomable comparison to Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
He then stated that, in his view, the Nazis were known to show some level of kindness.
“People would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress,” Trump said, implying that the Nazis had displayed “generosity” to prisoners.
He added, “No, they didn’t do that, they’d slap us,” referencing the hostages' accounts of their experiences.
His remarks were quickly condemned across social media, with many calling them a grotesque distortion of history.
Critics accused the president of romanticising Nazi atrocities and diminishing the reality of the Holocaust, which saw the systematic murder of six million Jews.
“This isn’t just delusional. It’s Holocaust cosplay,” one user wrote on X (formerly Twitter), while another added, “Equating hostages held by Hamas to victims in Nazi Germany isn’t just offensive, it’s a grotesque distortion of history.”
Trump’s comments, made while sitting beside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is overseeing military operations in Gaza, have sparked outrage and raised concerns about his understanding of the gravity of the words he uses.
Many have pointed out that such comparisons trivialise the suffering of Holocaust survivors and misrepresent the brutality of both the Nazis and Hamas.
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