Did President Joe Biden leave Israel just two hours before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023? No, that's not true: White House press releases prove he was in Washington, D.C.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok published by @tomika2121 on October 9, 2023, under the title (translated from Hungarian into English by Lead Stories staff):
And it turns out that Biden left the country two hours before the attack.
This is how the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Oct 11 12:03:46 2023 UTC)
Hamas launched its attack on Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023. White House press releases prove that he was not in Israel that day, and such a trip was not mentioned on his official social media pages.
As Israel is seven hours ahead of Washington, it was late night on the East Coast when Hamas attacked Israel. In his remarks condemning the attack, Biden highlighted that he saw the news in the morning when he woke up and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He had appeared in the Roosevelt Room of the White House at 12:20 p.m. EDT on October 6, 2023, to brief the press on the September jobs report and National Manufacturing Day. He was in the State Dining Room at 2:48 p.m. EDT on October 7, 2023, to condemn the Hamas attack.
Lead Stories has also debunked the claim that $8 billion in new aid was given to Israel after the Hamas attack and that Ukraine sold weapons allegedly paid for by the United States to Hamas to attack Israel.
