‘Hasn’t happened for 3,000 years’: Trump claims credit for settling Gaza war; repeats India-Pak ceasefire claim

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he has “settled so many wars” and suggested that a major breakthrough in West Asia may have already been achieved.

Addressing the military leaders in Quantico, he repeated his claim of brokering peace between nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India, and declared that “yesterday could be the settlement in the Middle East” — a feat he said “hasn’t happened in 3,000 years.”

“I’ve settled so many wars… Yesterday, we might have settled the biggest of them all. Although I’m not sure, Pakistan and India were very big. Both nuclear powers. I settled that. But yesterday could be the settlement in the Middle East. That hasn’t happened for 3000 years… Hamas has to agree. If they don’t, it will be very tough on them. All of the Arab nations, Muslim nations, have agreed. Israel has agreed. It’s an amazing thing,” said Trump.

Trump recounted what he described as his intervention during a tense military standoff between India and Pakistan.

“India and Pakistan were going at it. I called them both… They had just shot down seven planes… I said, if you do this, there’s not going to be any trade, and I stopped the war. It was raging for four days,” he said.

He further added, “The Prime Minister of Pakistan was here, along with the Field Marshal, who’s a very important guy in Pakistan… He said to a group of people that were with us that this man saved millions of lives because he saved the war from going on. That war was going to get very bad.”

Trump has made similar claims in the past, but India has firmly denied them. New Delhi has repeatedly asserted that the ceasefire agreement with Pakistan was achieved bilaterally through direct communication between the Directors General of Military Operations (DGMOs), without any external involvement.

The US President also used his recent speech at the United Nations General Assembly to portray himself as a global peacemaker, claiming that he had ended “seven unendable wars” during his second term.

“In just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars,” he said, adding, “They said they were unendable — some were going for thirty-one years, one for thirty-six years. I ended seven wars and in all cases they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed. I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for stopping these wars.”

He went on to cite disputes involving India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, Serbia and Kosovo, the Congo and Rwanda, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia and Armenia and Azerbaijan as examples of conflicts he claimed to have defused.

With inputs from agencies