Harris labels Biden Gaza response 'inadequate': 'I … pleaded with Joe'

Former Vice President Harris labeled former President Biden’s response to the killing of civilians in the Gaza Strip as “inadequate, writing in her book that she “pleaded” with her boss to show more “empathy.”

“I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians,” Harris wrote in her book “107 Days.”

“But he couldn’t do it: While he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced,” the ex-vice president said in the memoir, according to a copy obtained by Axios.

The Biden administration was criticized by the left flank of the Democratic Party over its handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Publicly, Harris largely remained in lockstep with the former president when it came to the conflict, although at times would offer different rhetoric when addressing the human toll in the war-torn enclave.

In the book, Harris reiterated that Israel had the “right” to respond to Palestinian militant group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Jewish state, where around 1,200 Israelis were killed and some 250 were taken hostage.

“But the ferocity of Netanyahu’s response, the number of innocent Palestinian women and children killed, and his failure to prioritize the lives of the hostages had weakened Israel’s moral position internationally and created angry dissent within Israel itself,” Harris wrote in her memoir, which will be publicly released on Tuesday.

She also addressed dealing with pro-Palestinian protestors, who demonstrated at her rallies during her short-lived 2024 White House bid.

“The threat to withhold their vote got to me. It felt reckless,” Harris said. “The issue was not binary, but the outcome of this election certainly was.”

The comments come as the war in Gaza nears its two-year mark and as the Israeli military has moved to take over part of Gaza City.

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