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Former U.S. President Donald Trump said he will return a set of ancient lamps to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported Thursday.
Israeli officials have reportedly been struggling to reclaim artifacts that were intended for a White House exhibition but ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
The artifacts, a collection of ceramic oil lamps, were loaned in 2019 for a White House exhibition that never took place due to bureaucratic issues, according to a report earlier this week in Haaretz.
“These historic items were presented by a representative of the Israeli Antiquities Authority with the full support of the organization,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said in an article explaining how the lamps got to Mar-a-Lago in the first place, according to information from an unidentified Trump spokesman.
Jewish Republican donor Saul Fox, who is also a large donor to the IAA, reportedly presented the artifacts to the former president at the 2019 White House Chanukah party in gratitude for his pro-Israel policies. Fox expected them to remain a “permanent exhibition of Israel’s national treasures” in Trump’s custody and ignored an urgent message from the IAA director that there had been a “miscommunication” and that the lamps must be returned, WSJ reported.
The former director of the IAA told the news outlet that “Saul Fox had operated transparently,” the report said.
Trump said that he will return the items.
