Netanyahu will meet Harris’ Republican rival, Donald Trump, on Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Ahead of the Harris-Netanyahu meeting, Trump said at a rally in North Carolina the vice president was “totally against the Jewish people.”
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A ceasefire has been the subject of negotiations for months. US officials believe the parties are closer than ever before to an agreement for a six-week ceasefire in exchange for the release by Hamas of women, sick, elderly and wounded hostages.
“There has been hopeful movement in the talks to secure an agreement on this deal, and as I just told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” Harris said.
Although as vice president she has mostly echoed Biden in firmly backing Israel’s right to defend itself, she made clear on Thursday that she was losing patience with Israel’s military approach.
“Israel has a right to defend itself. And how it does so matters,” Harris said.
In March, she bluntly stated that Israel was not doing enough to ease a “humanitarian catastrophe” during its ground offensive in the Palestinian enclave. Later, she did not rule out “consequences” for Israel if it launched a full-scale invasion of refugee-packed Rafah in southern Gaza.
A divided party
The Gaza conflict has splintered the Democratic Party, and sparked months of protests at Biden events. A drop in support among Arab Americans could hurt Democratic chances in Michigan, one of a handful of states likely to decide the November 5 election.
In a nod to those concerns, Harris urged Americans to help “encourage efforts to understand the complexity, the nuance and the history of the region.”
“To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you,” she said. “Let’s get the deal done so we can get a ceasefire to end the war.”
New polling suggests close race
In an Oval Office address on Wednesday, Biden cited a desire for unity in the Democratic Party as it seeks to defeat Trump as a main reason he decided not to seek reelection but to instead support Harris for the 2024 race.
Trump leads by 48 per cent to Harris’ 46 per cent in a New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters conducted July 22 to 24. The poll of 1142 registered voters nationwide had a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.
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