Vice President Kamala Harris may have made it more difficult to close a hostage deal, a startled senior Israeli official said after hearing the remarks she issued to the press late Thursday afternoon.
“We hope that it won’t make it harder to achieve a hostage deal because it gives the appearance of day light between Israel and the United States,” the official said.
Harris surprised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those close to him by issuing her statement, which she also placed on X shortly after her hour-long meeting with him.
They spoke in the aftermath of his conversation at the White House with US President Joe Biden in the early afternoon and in advance of his scheduled meeting with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee on Sunday when Biden withdrew from the race and her meeting with Netanyahu was her first with a foreign dignitary since she embarked on the campaign trail.
Netanyahu has used his visit to the United States to meet with Harris and Trump to help strengthen those ties, given that one of them is likely to become the US president in January.
Netanyahu and Harris briefly shook hands at the start of their meeting, which was closed to the media. There were no joint statements at the end.
Tensions in US-Israel relationship
During the conversation, Netanyahu and those with him emphasized to Harris how important it was for the negotiations that the US and Israel present a united front with regard to the principled points of the deal, which is being negotiated by Qatar and Egypt with help from the Biden administration.
It believed that the discord between the two allies, Israel and the United States, emboldened Hamas to harden its position.
Netanyahu believes that the resounding applause he received during his speech to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday and overall US support along with IDF military pressure in Gaza, has helped sway Hamas to make a deal to secure the release of the remaining 115 captives in Gaza.
The importance of unity with regard to the hostage deal was clear during the meeting Netanyahu held with Biden, which lasted for an hour and a half, an official explained.
“The more our enemies see that there is a unified position between Israel and the US,” a senior official said, the more “we increase the chance of securing the release of the hostages, and decrease the chance of a regional war.”
“The larger the divide – the more we move away from a deal and thus we also increase the possibility of a military flare-up,” the official stated.
At issue for Netanyahu and his team was Harris’s statement about how Israel would completely withdraw from Gaza at the end of phase two of the deal.
The issue of a permanent ceasefire had been one of the sticking points of the agreement, with Hamas initially insisting that Israel must first pledge to a permanent ceasefire before it would free any hostages.
Hamas’s decision to drop that demand was one of the critical steps that brought both sides close to a deal, in which the question of a permanent ceasefire would be discussed starting on day 16, of the 42-day phase one of the deal.
Netanyahu in his joint speech to Congress had emphasized the importance of a complete military victory over Hamas, a point which the Prime Minister has also repeatedly stressed in Israel.
The three-phase proposal is designed to create a narrow balancing act between the positions held by Hamas and Israel, that lets a deal get underway, while fully addressing the issue of a permanent ceasefire.
Harris, however, in her statement made it appear as if the deal would definitely include a complete IDF withdrawal from Gaza in phase 2, a step that has not been agreed upon. In a de-facto way, she gave Hamas a pledge of a permanent ceasefire before the deal got underway.
Israeli officials were also frustrated by Harris’s characterization of the food insecurity in Gaza, explaining that Netanyahu had also emphasized to Harris how many steps Israel was taking to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza.
None of the Hamas fighters Israel has captured in Gaza has shown signs of starvation, an official noted.
One official said, ‘I was surprised by her statement,” adding that she was more “aggressive” in her press remarks than she had been during her conversation with Netanyahu.