Washington D.C. [United States], November 10 : Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is scheduled to visit Israel on Sunday making him the first Republican presidential candidate to travel to the country since the outbreak of its war with Hamas, The Hill reported.
"Tomorrow night, I'm leaving to go to Israel because I want to see for myself. I'll be meeting with Israeli officials and with survivors of the Hamas terrorist attack," Christie said in a post on X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.
Christie is running for the Republican vote in the primary elections, where state by state, members of each party vote on who they would like to run for President. The US Presidential elections are set for November 2024.
"If you want to be president, you can't be afraid to go and see what's happening on the ground around the world," Christie said.
In August, Christie flew to Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Russia and met with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"America has never moved forward by ignoring the rest of the world," he said in a post on X at the time. We can't start now," reported The Hill.
Asked in a Thursday night interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper about whether Israel should "push toward some sort of a two-state solution," Christie said that conversations about it "had to have stopped" when the Hamas attack that started the current conflict occurred early last month.
"[S]o, there was a ceasefire, that everybody's talking about now, before October 7th," Christie said in the interview in the wake of his Israel trip announcement.
"It was Hamas, that violated it," Christie later continued, reports The Hill.
Israeli forces began a ground invasion of Gaza late last month, despite warnings that the operation could result in worsened humanitarian conditions in the territory. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has said more than 10,000 Palestinians have died since the start of the war at the beginning of last month.
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