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U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Wednesday morning—their first phone call since Aug. 21, according to White House readouts of their communications.
The two leaders did not appear to speak on Oct. 7, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s terror attack in southern Israel, and the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, and there were no public acknowledgments of communication between the two in the aftermath of Iran’s Oct. 1 missile barrage against the Jewish state.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, joined the two leaders on the call, during which Biden “affirmed his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security” and “condemned unequivocally Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel on Oct. 1,” per a White House readout of the call.
Biden “emphasized the need for a diplomatic arrangement to safely return both Lebanese and Israeli civilians to their homes on both sides of the Blue Line” and “affirmed Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of missiles and rockets into Israel over the past year alone,” per the White House.
The U.S. president also stressed “the need to minimize harm to civilians, in particular in the densely-populated areas of Beirut,” according to the U.S. readout.
“On Gaza, the leaders discussed the urgent need to renew diplomacy to release the hostages held by Hamas,” it added, and Biden “discussed the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the imperative to restore access to the north, including by reinvigorating the corridor from Jordan immediately.”
The call, according to Israeli media, lasted about 50 minutes.
The U.S. president commented on the call later on Wednesday. “Asked about his call with Netanyahu, Biden joked as he walked out of the Roosevelt Room, ‘we didn’t talk about the storm,’” per the White House pool report. (Hurricane Milton is approaching Florida.)
Biden has previously said that he would oppose an Israeli airstrike on Iran’s oil infrastructure, suggesting that such an attack would not be proportional, given that the roughly 180 ballistic missiles that the Islamic Republic fired at Israel did not result in any Israeli deaths or cause serious damage to infrastructure.