Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met US President Joe Biden on Thursday, a day after his polarising joint address to the US Congress that drew boycotts and protesters.
The meeting is Netanyahu’s first visit to the White House since he returned to power in late 2022, and is seen by US officials as a chance to push the Israeli premier on a proposed Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal that he has yet to publicly endorse, including in his congressional speech.
Netanyahu remains under fire over the failures that led to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and faces growing calls to agree to the US-backed deal opposed by his far-right coalition partners that would bring an end to the fighting and free the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
“It’s reaching a point that we believe a deal is closable and it’s time to move to close that agreement,” a senior US administration official said ahead of Netanyahu’s meetings, adding that both Israel and Hamas had to take steps that would allow for the deal to be implemented.
The prime minister also met vice-president Kamala Harris on Thursday afternoon. Harris, who did not attend Netanyahu’s address to Congress, on Thursday denounced the protests that have accompanied the visit, saying that “antisemitism, hate and violence” had no place in America.
In comments to reporters after her meeting the presumptive presidential candidate offered a glimpse of how she might pursue the US-Israel relationship should she win the election.
While she took similar positions to Biden on the Israel-Hamas war, she was more critical of Israel’s conduct, saying that while she had long had “an unwavering commitment to Israel”, which has the right to defend itself, “how it does so matters”.
In the meeting she also expressed serious concerns about the “scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians”. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” she said.
She called for an end to the war and said there had been “hopeful movement” towards a ceasefire agreement. “To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace: I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done,” she said.
About half of congressional Democrats skipped Netanyahu’s speech on Wednesday, in which he praised both Biden and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump but remained defiant about his war effort and the thousands of demonstrators who had gathered nearby to call for the US to stop arming Israel and an end to the war in Gaza.
In his speech the prime minister reiterated that Israel would not stop until it had achieved “total victory” over Hamas, the militant group that carried out the October 7 attack that sparked the war.
“America and Israel must stand together,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday. “Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight and our victory will be your victory.”
Despite the pressure, the prime minister on Wednesday laid out his postwar vision, telling US lawmakers that Israel wanted to see a “demilitarised and deradicalised Gaza” and that it did not intend to reoccupy the enclave but would seek to “retain overriding security control” for the “foreseeable future” to prevent a resurgence of Hamas.
The war in Gaza has strained Israel’s relations with the US, and Netanyahu made an effort to strike a conciliatory tone in the chamber.
This was a notable contrast with a speech he gave in 2015 urging Congress to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that had recently been agreed by the US and other governments, infuriating then-President Barack Obama and Democrats.
Additional reporting by Mehul Srivastava in London