Kamala Harris says she will always defend Israel, calls Gaza suffering ‘heartbreaking’

U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are “working around the clock” to “get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done,” Harris said at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday, as she formally accepted her party’s nomination for president.

Toward the end of her 40-minute-long remarks — which concluded shortly after 10 p.m. local time and which varied, with respect to Israel, only slightly from prepared remarks that her campaign circulated to press — Harris expressed strong support for both the Jewish state and the Palestinian people.

“Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” Harris said. “Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on Oct. 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”

“At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” the vice president added, to loud applause. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

Harris told attendees that she and Biden “are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, criticized Harris’s remarks about the Jewish state.

“Harris just made clear she is for Israel’s defense from terrorists but opposes its offense against terrorists,” Goldberg wrote. “In triangulating good and evil, she created a false moral equivalency between Oct. 7 and Israel’s just war of self-defense.”

Harris said in her speech that she will also “never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”

She also said that her family instilled in her “the values they personified: community, faith and the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated with kindness, respect and compassion.”

Earlier in the convention, Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, said that she helped him connect more deeply to his faith.

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