WASHINGTON _ A U.S. Embassy website and military Twitter account posted a video clip that cut any mention of Israel out of President Donald Trump's announcement of his upcoming trip to Europe and the Middle East.
The State Department later said the doctored video clip was an "inadvertent mistake" and expressed regret for the incident. It was removed from the website and an embassy Twitter feed.
The same video appeared on the U.S. Army Central Command's Arabic-language Twitter feed. It was still there on Tuesday.
Trump said last Thursday that he will stop in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican, ahead of NATO and G-7 summits in Brussels and Sicily, respectively, on his first foreign trip as president.
Trump portrayed the trip, which will run from May 19 to May 27, as an overture to the homes of the world's three major monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
But a one-minute and 41-second video of Trump's announcement posted on the website at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, had been edited to exclude mention of Israel.
Most of the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, does not formally recognize Israel as a country, largely because of displacement of the Palestinians with the creation of the Jewish state.
In a statement, the State Department said the embassy in Riyadh took the clip from a Saudi social media account and posted it, with Arabic subtitles, without realizing the president's words had been doctored.
"The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh shared a version of the video announcement from a private Saudi citizen's social media account," the statement said. "Unknowingly, the shared version had been edited to remove the word 'Israel.'"
The embassy "expresses its regret for this inadvertent mistake."
The clip was removed following a protest from Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
"I am appalled that the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia disingenuously posted this incomplete and misleading video," Engel said in a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
He said the video implied that Washington accepted the Saudi "rejectionist position" toward Israel.
An Army Central Command spokesman said his office was waiting to see what the embassy instructed before deciding whether to remove the clip.
