Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has pressed Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza in talks that she described as frank, adding “I will not be silent.”
In comments that were closely watched for signs of a shift from Joe Biden’s policy approach, the US vice-president said after the meeting: “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.”
She acknowledged that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and denounced Hamas as a brutal terrorist organisation that triggered the war and had committed ‘“horrific acts of sexual violence” but she made clear that how Israel defended itself mattered, adding later: “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies [in Gaza]. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”
She called for the establishment of a Palestinian state and for Netanyahu and Hamas to agree a ceasefire and hostage release deal to end a war she said had led to the deaths of far too many innocent civilians. “As I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” she said.
Hours earlier, Israel’s prime minister had enjoyed a more cordial greeting from Biden in the Oval Office, saying: “From a proud Jewish Zionist to a proud Irish-American Zionist, I want to thank you for 50 years of public service and 50 years of support for the state of Israel.”
According to a White House account of their meeting, the two leaders discussed the ceasefire and hostage negotiations “in detail”, and Biden “expressed the need to close the remaining gaps, finalize the deal as soon as possible, bring the hostages home, and reach a durable end to the war in Gaza”.
Harris’ forceful remarks on Thursday, which were sharp and serious in tone, reflected what might mark a departure from Biden in how she deals with Netanyahu. Some noted the significance of Harris being the one to give public remarks after both she and Biden had separately met the prime minister.
During the meeting, Harris brought up the repeated displacement of Palestinians since the start of the war, sparked by Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on 7 October in which 1,200 civilians were killed and 250 hostages taken.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Harris also recalled planting trees for Israel as a child and said that as a senator from California and as vice-president she has had an “unwavering commitment to the existence of the state of Israel” and its people. She said Israel has “a right to defend itself and how it does so matters.”
Harris’s backers say that she is more likely to engage in public criticism of Netanyahu than Biden and to focus attention on the civilian toll among Palestinians from the war in Gaza – even if she would maintain US military aid and other support for Israel that has been a mainstay of Biden’s foreign policy.
White House officials say Israel and Hamas are “closer now than we’ve been before” to reaching a ceasefire deal, with a senior administration official saying a framework for the deal had been agreed upon but that “serious implementation issues … still had to be resolved. “I don’t expect the meeting to be a yes or no,” the official said. “It’s a kind of like: ‘How do we close these final gaps?’”
Netanyahu promised “total victory” in the Gaza war in a raucous speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, saying that there were “intensive” efforts to bring the hostages home but giving little detail about how that would be achieved.
Harris – the presiding officer of the Senate – did not attend Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday but released a careful statement saying that her absence should not be interpreted as a boycott of the event.
Netanyahu said on Thursday he met Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Washington on Wednesday after his address to Congress. “We discussed the opportunities and challenges in AI, its impact on the economy and society, and explored ways for technological cooperation with Israel,” Netanyahu said in a post on X.
Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet Trump on Friday at his residence in Mar-a-Lago. The two men have had a strained relationship since Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his victory in the 2020 election, which Trump has claimed without evidence was manipulated.
With Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse