⭕️ Kamala Harris supported continued US military aid to Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza and refused to endorse an arms embargo, including when pressed during her 2024 presidential campaign.
➤ A US federal judge found in January 2024 that Israel's conduct in Gaza plausibly constitutes genocide, imploring the administration to reconsider its "unflagging support," in a case brought against Biden, Blinken and Austin. Days earlier, the ICJ had ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts, triggering every state party's own duty to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention.
➤ Harris still continued publicly backing military aid and declined to support an arms embargo through the end of the campaign. She voiced concern for Palestinian civilians, but never opposed the weapons transfers sustaining the deliberate civilian killings.
➤ Accepting the nomination at the Democratic convention on August 22, 2024, Harris vowed to ensure that the US military remains the “most lethal fighting force in the world" and that Israel would always have "the ability to defend itself." Twelve days earlier, the UN human rights office reported it had recorded Israeli strikes on at least 21 different schools sheltering displaced Palestinians in just one month since July 4, killing at least 274 people. These were schools in “safe areas” Israel had instructed Palestinians to flee to after ordering them out of their homes.
➤ Economist Dan Steinbock, author of The Obliteration Doctrine: Genocide Prevention, Israel, Gaza and the West, argues legal accountability should extend to Harris, invoking Article III of the Genocide Convention, which makes "complicity in genocide" punishable. His book names her directly, describing her as "touting continued military aid to Israel amid the atrocities."
➤ In September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry, the Human Rights Council's highest-level investigative body, concluded Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
➤ By the end of the Biden-Harris term, Gaza’s Health Ministry had recorded 47,035 Palestinians killed. A peer-reviewed Lancet analysis had already estimated that violent deaths likely exceeded 70,000 by October 2024.
Harris has not repudiated the policy of arming Israel or expressed regret for any specific decision she or the administration made during 15 months of live-streamed killings and collective punishment.
Astead asks Mehdi Hasan what he thinks about Kamala Harris campaigning with El-Sayed today:
When the vice president comes to you and says, "I want to endorse you and campaign with you and you're not asked to change your positions on Israel Palestine"
I feel like you've won.