Former President Donald Trump’s continued silence with regard to Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday is drawing scrutiny in some Republican pro-Israel foreign policy circles, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris had been quick to personally voice her approval of the stunning attack shortly after it occurred.

Trump himself has not yet weighed in on the attack, nor has his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) — who is currently preparing for his first and only debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday. Representatives for Vance declined to comment on the Nasrallah assassination. 

Meanwhile, three days after the massive Israeli airstrike in Lebanon that took out Hezbollah’s top commander, who led the Iran-backed terror group for more than three decades, a Trump campaign spokesperson shared a statement with Jewish Insider on Monday that made no mention of the assassination and took aim largely at Harris, while touting the former president’s pro-Israel record.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we had historic peace in the Middle East,” said Karoline Leavitt, a national press secretary for the Trump campaign. “Now, all of the progress made by President Trump in the region has been unraveled by Kamala Harris’s weakness and America Last policies. When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, the hostages will be brought home, and the bloodshed will end.”

The statement was received with skepticism and even hostility by some conservative foreign policy hawks, who questioned why the campaign, which has often been reticent to respond to major events in the Middle East, had not credited Israel for killing Nasrallah — long one of the country’s top military targets.

“There’s no question that Donald Trump, during his tenure, was less squeamish about both getting rid of terrorists and offending Iran,” said Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Joel Giederman, a pro-Israel donor who sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which is backing Trump, was even more critical, denouncing the statement as “senseless and non-responsive.”

The former president “should be forthright that killing a bloodthirsty terrorist was a good thing,” Geiderman told JI. “America didn’t do it — Israel did.”

The statement was characteristic of Trump’s recent public comments on Israel and the broader Middle East, including repeated claims that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks “would never have happened” if he had been president.

But the lack of a clear response to Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, which presaged an expected Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, is now raising questions about where Trump will land on key foreign policy issues, even as he continues to attack Harris and President Joe Biden as feckless on the Middle East.

Despite his aggressive policies to counter Iran as president, Trump has during his campaign made some head-turning remarks on the Middle East that have contradicted past statements, while failing to outline how he would handle turmoil in the region differently than the Biden administration.

Just last week, for instance, the former president suggested that he was open to talks with Iran about a renewed nuclear agreement that he himself ended while in office and Biden sought to resurrect. 

The former president also recently met with Qatari leaders in Florida for a discussion he publicized on his Truth Social account — even as GOP lawmakers have assailed the Gulf kingdom for hosting Hamas.

And perhaps most memorably, Trump drew bipartisan backlash days after the Oct. 7 attacks, when he criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called Hezbollah “very smart” as it exchanged rockets with Israel. He soon walked back his comments, and his campaign said his remarks had been misinterpreted.

But as Israel planned for a potentially imminent ground invasion into Lebanon on Monday, Trump had yet to confirm if he agreed with his son-in-law and former senior advisor, Jared Kushner, who in a lengthy social media post on Saturday hailed the assassination of Nasrallah as “the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords.”

“The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job” in its war with Hezbollah, Kushner said.

In a statement a day after the assassination, Harris, for her part, castigated Nasrallah as “a terrorist with American blood on his hands” and said his death had brought “a measure of justice” to “Hezbollah’s victims.”

But while Harris vowed to “always support Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups,” the vice president, echoing Biden, warned against escalating “into a broader regional war” and urged a “diplomatic solution” in order “to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.”

The assassination has drawn bipartisan support on the Hill, even as numerous Republican lawmakers have also called on the White House to end its push for a cease-fire.

Trump, on the other hand, has not clarified where he stands on Israel’s military response to Hezbollah, even as JI had asked his campaign on Monday if he aligns with Kushner. One Republican foreign policy expert familiar with the Trump campaign said that he had “no doubt” the former president “thinks it’s great,” and chalked up the “failure to say so” to what he called “bad staff work.”

“I’d been told this campaign staff was the best ever, but I don’t see it when this kind of thing happens — when they can’t react quickly,” he told JI via email.

Before his campaign had issued its statement to JI, some pro-Israel Republicans said they had not even noticed that Trump had been silent on Nasrallah’s death. “As strong a supporter of Israel as he’s been and has promised to be, I had presumed he’d made a statement and would expect that he should make a very strong statement supporting Bibi’s action,” said Fred Zeidman, a leading GOP donor and RJC board member, using a nickname for Netanyahu, shortly before the campaign had weighed in on the attack.

In a statement to JI, Sam Markstein, an RJC spokesperson, defended the Trump campaign’s delayed response, drawing a harsh contrast with Harris.

“The difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is the former is all talk and incompetence while the latter is action-oriented and strong,” he said on Monday. “Nobody has been a better friend to the Jewish state or a greater deterrent to Iranian aggression than Trump, while Harris has presided over an era of weakness, appeasement and unprecedented enriching and emboldening of the terrorists in Tehran. No amount of spin can change those facts.”

Barry Funt, another RJC board member and GOP donor, shared a more measured reaction to Trump’s campaign statement on Monday, saying that he was not concerned by its substance and agreed with its premise — even as it had fallen short of referencing Nasrallah.

“With Trump I always focus on what he does and not what he says,” he told JI in an email, “so while others may be agitated, I am neither disappointed nor surprised.”