Once more, US vice president Kamala Harris is making headlines for something she said in public. Only now, it’s not because of her circuitous rambling about the passage of time, or her passion for the craters of the moon, or for face-planting in a nationally televised interview, or for explaining how context is not like a coconut tree. This time, it’s for seeming to come out ahead of the administration in which she serves on Israel’s war on Gaza, sharply criticizing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign and calling for an “immediate cease-fire.”

“What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating. We have seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed, women giving birth to malnourished babies with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration,” a stone-faced Harris, voice trembling with barely contained anger, said on Monday at the Edmund Pettys bridge in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights marchers were brutalized nearly sixty years ago. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”

Harris very nearly made the powerful moment she was grasping for into yet another comical sound bite, in declaring that “there must be an immediate cease-fire” — pause for applause — “for at least the next six weeks.” Besides a perfect comic beat, this and the rest of Harris’s speech were indistinguishable from the rest of the Joe Biden administration and its resistance to calls for a permanent cease-fire. Sure enough, when Netanyahu’s nominally liberal rival Benny Gantz visited Washington the day before the speech, Harris reportedly told him that the White House wished to keep backing Israel’s war but needed Israel to play ball on aid deliveries to be able to do it, adding, “help us help you.”