A senior Israeli official warned that Vice President Kamala Harris’s comments on Thursday after her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could derail the ceasefire talks.
The Israeli official, who briefed reporters after the two leaders met, effectively argued that Harris’s comments showed a potential rift between the two allies that Hamas could exploit if Israel is further pressured into a deal.
“Hopefully the remarks Harris made in her press conference won’t be interpreted by Hamas as daylight between the U.S. and Israel, thereby making a deal harder to secure,” the senior official said, according to the Times of Israel.
“The more our enemies see that there is complete alignment of positions between Israel and the U.S., the more we increase the chance of securing the release of the hostages and decrease the chance of a regional war,” the senior official added. “The more the gap widens between our countries, the more we move away from a deal and thus also increase the possibility of a regional escalation.”
The vice president, in short remarks after the meeting, reiterated many of the comments the Biden administration has repeated over the course of the war, though she added emphasis on the plight of Palestinian civilians who have been displaced, lost loved ones, and face the threat of disease and famine.
Harris declared that she would not “look away in the face of these tragedies” and said she “will not be silent.”
The meeting had heightened importance, given Harris’s recent rise as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee after President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign. It was her first meeting with a foreign leader since her rise and provided her with an opportunity to provide voters insight into the stance a potential Harris administration could take.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Washington Examiner that he wasn’t surprised by Netanyahu’s address to Congress or Harris’s comments after their meeting, though he noted the Israeli leader is in the U.S. at “a totally unique juncture in America’s political history” and is trying to stay in both former President Donald Trump’s and Harris’s good graces for when one of them is sworn into office next January.
Harris called Hamas “a brutal terrorist organization” and said the group “triggered this war” with the Oct. 7 attack that left 1,200 people dead and another roughly 250 who were kidnapped and brought back to Gaza. Harris noted that “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.”
Her comments stand in contrast to Netanyahu, who defended the Israeli military’s actions during his Wednesday address to Congress and said that the number of civilian casualties was actually impressive amid the context of urban warfare against militants above and below ground who embed themselves within large civilian populations. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry reports that roughly 39,000 Palestinians have been killed during the conflict, but the number does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
“Some said, ‘If Israel enters Rafah, Palestinian civilians have nowhere to go.’ But guess what, we entered and took Rafah, and there was the lowest rate of civilian casualties in the entire Gaza,” Netanyahu said.
The U.S. was among a large contingent of Western countries that advised Israel not to operate in Rafah. President Joe Biden, who also met with Netanyahu on Thursday, threatened months ago to withhold offensive military aid to Israel if it carried out a full-scale invasion of Rafah.
The vice president called for both sides to agree to the ceasefire deal that is now on the table, which would secure the release of dozens of the Israeli hostages whom Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7.
U.S. officials are optimistic about the potential deal, though it has not been finalized yet and several previous attempts to get a ceasefire agreement across the finish line have failed.
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“We are closer now than we’ve been before,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday afternoon.
Netanyahu is set to meet with Trump on Friday, and Oren predicted that any bad blood between the two leaders will be “ironed out” and that the former president is “going to make the case that the Republican Party is the true pro-Israel party.”