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Kamala Harris Says De-Escalation Needed in Middle East

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks to the press before boarding Air Force Two at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, as she travels to Arizona. (Photo by RONDA CHURCHILL / AFP)
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks to the press before boarding Air Force Two at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, as she travels to Arizona. (Photo by RONDA CHURCHILL / AFP)
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Kamala Harris Says De-Escalation Needed in Middle East

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks to the press before boarding Air Force Two at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, as she travels to Arizona. (Photo by RONDA CHURCHILL / AFP)
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks to the press before boarding Air Force Two at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, as she travels to Arizona. (Photo by RONDA CHURCHILL / AFP)

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said on Thursday that de-escalation was needed in the Middle East, a region on edge for months amid Israel's wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
WHY IT'S IMPORTANT
A ceasefire remains elusive in Gaza and Lebanon and the region is bracing for an Israeli response to an Iranian missile attack last week carried out in retaliation for Israel's military action in Lebanon. No one in Israel was killed in Iran's attack, and Washington called it ineffective.
For Gaza, President Joe Biden put forward a three-phase ceasefire plan on May 31, which has run into obstacles for months over Israeli demands of keeping presence in a corridor on Gaza's border with Egypt and over differences in exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
In Lebanon, Washington and Paris put forward a 21-day ceasefire proposal in late September that Israel rejected.
KEY QUOTES
"We have got to reach a ceasefire," Harris told reporters as she departed Las Vegas, while commenting on the situations in Gaza and Lebanon. "We've got to de-escalate."
Washington's occasional condemnation of Israel over the war's civilian death toll has mostly been verbal with no substantive change in policy.
CONTEXT
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel's subsequent military assault on Gaza has killed almost 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and displaced nearly the entire population, while causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
Israel's recent operations in Lebanon have killed hundreds, wounded thousands and displaced over a million. Israel says it is targeting Lebanese Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.

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US Still Believes Iran Has Not Decided to Build a Nuclear Weapon

This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows Iran's nuclear site in Isfahan, Iran, April 4, 2024. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)
This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows Iran's nuclear site in Isfahan, Iran, April 4, 2024. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)
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US Still Believes Iran Has Not Decided to Build a Nuclear Weapon

This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows Iran's nuclear site in Isfahan, Iran, April 4, 2024. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)
This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows Iran's nuclear site in Isfahan, Iran, April 4, 2024. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

The United States still believes that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon despite Tehran's recent strategic setbacks, including Israel's killing of Hezbollah leaders and two largely unsuccessful attempts to attack Israel, two US officials told Reuters.
The comments from a senior Biden administration official and a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) added to public remarks earlier this week by CIA Director William Burns, who said the United States had not seen any evidence Iran's leader had reversed his 2003 decision to suspend the weaponization program.
"We assess that the Supreme Leader has not made a decision to resume the nuclear weapons program that Iran suspended in 2003," said the ODNI spokesperson, referring to Iran's leader Ali Khamenei.
The intelligence assessment could help explain US opposition to any Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear program in retaliation for a ballistic missile attack that Tehran carried out last week.
President Joe Biden said after that attack he would not support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites, but did not explain why he had reached that conclusion. His remarks drew fierce criticism from Republicans, including former President Donald Trump.
US officials have long acknowledged that an attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program might only delay the country's efforts to develop a nuclear bomb and could even strengthen Tehran's resolve to do so.
"We're all watching this space very carefully," the Biden administration official said.
Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment but Tehran has repeatedly denied ever having had a nuclear weapons program.
KEY IRAN ALLY WEAKENED
In the past weeks, Israel's military has inflicted heavy losses on Hezbollah, the most powerful member of the Iran-backed network known as the Axis of Resistance. The group's setbacks have included the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike last month.
The weakening of a key Iranian ally has prompted some experts to speculate that Tehran may restart its efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb to protect itself.
Beth Sanner, a former US deputy director of national intelligence, said the risk of Khamenei reversing his 2003 religious dictum against nuclear weapons is "higher now than it has been" and that if Israel were to strike nuclear facilities Tehran would likely move ahead with building a nuclear weapon.
That would still take time, however.
"They can't get a weapon in a day. It will take months and months and months," said Sanner, now a fellow with the German Marshall Fund.
Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% fissile purity, close to the 90% of weapons grade, at two sites, and in theory it has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for almost four bombs, according to a yardstick of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog.
The expansion in Iran's enrichment program has reduced the so-called breakout time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb to "a week or a little more," according to Burns, from more than a year under a 2015 accord that Trump pulled out of when president.
Actually making a bomb with that material would take longer. How long is less clear and the subject of debate.
POSSIBLE ISRAELI ATTACK
Israel has not yet disclosed what it will target in retaliation for Iran's attack last week with more than 180 ballistic missiles, which largely failed thanks to interceptions by Israeli air defenses as well as by the US military.
The United States has been privately urging Israel to calibrate its response to avoid triggering a broader war in the Middle East, officials say, with Biden publicly voicing his opposition to a nuclear attack and concerns about a strike on Iran's energy infrastructure.
Israel, however, views Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat.
The conflicts in the Middle East between Israel and Iran and Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen have become campaign issues ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election, with Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, positioning themselves as pro-Israel.
Speaking at a campaign event last week, Trump mocked Biden for opposing an attack on Iran's nuclear sites, saying: "That's the thing you wanna hit, right?"
Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence officer and government official, said Iran still had space to compensate for setbacks dealt to its proxies and missile force without having to resort to developing a nuclear warhead.
"The Iranians have to recalculate what's next. I don't think at this point they will rush to either develop or boost the (nuclear) program toward military capacity," he said.
"They will look around to find what maneuvering space they can move around in."