The Uncommitted National Movement, a coalition of antiwar activists attempting to push the Democratic Party to cut off arms to Israel and secure a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, said on Thursday it would not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris while encouraging its followers not to vote for former President Donald Trump nor third-party candidates in key swing states.

Trump will “accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing,” the group said in a statement, while voting third-party candidates, “especially” in battleground states, “could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given” what they called “our country’s broken electoral college system.”

“Today, the Uncommitted National Movement announces that as we continue advocating for lifesaving policy change which ends the bombing of Gaza and ends U.S. support for the Israeli military’s war crimes, Vice President Harris’ unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human right laws has made it impossible for us to endorse us,” the group said.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel in which Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people and took around 250 hostage.

The Uncommitted movement criticized Harris and the Democratic Party for not allowing a Palestinian American speaker at the Democratic National Convention in August — which featured numerous pro-Israel speakers, including the family members of hostages — while also “courting” the support of Republicans like former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The lack of concessions to the antiwar movement, the group argued, is pushing pro-Palestinian voters to “consider third-party options or to sit this important election out.”

"The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said. “She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination."

When President Joe Biden was running for reelection and faced little opposition in the Democratic Party, the group organized across the country in states where voting “uncommitted” or for a similar option was available.

The group has taken credit for 740,000 “pro-peace votes”  — including more than 100,000 in swing state Michigan, which is home to a large Arab-American population — and earned 30 uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Despite this, the Uncommitted movement was not given the opportunity to have a representative address the DNC and staged a sit-in on the convention's final days outside the arena where delegates had gathered.

The group said it ultimately wanted to “mobilize voters in key states to save lives and our democracy” had Harris shifted her policy on Gaza. But they had set a Sept. 15 deadline for Harris to meet with Palestinian American families in Michigan who “lost loved ones to U.S. supplied bombs in Gaza” and discuss demands for arms embargoes and a permanent cease-fire. Those meetings never materialized, the group said. 

A Harris campaign official cited the vice president’s outreach to the Muslim and Arab communities in the U.S., including highlighting endorsements from politicians from those communities, in response to questions about the Uncommitted movement’s criticisms. Harris met briefly with Uncommitted activists on a photo line in Detroit earlier this year and her staff have met with Arab American leaders in Michigan and elsewhere.

The campaign also pointed to Harris’ call with the mother of Wadea al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord in Illinois just days after the war began last October in what prosecutors allege was a hate crime. Harris spoke to his mother, who was also stabbed, with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff “to convey their heartbreak over her loss, wish her strength in her recovery from the attack, and to convey their commitment to fighting the rise of anti-Arab hate in America,” the official said. 

There has been little daylight between Harris’ rhetoric on the war and Biden’s policy so far. On Tuesday, speaking with a panel of reporters with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, Harris said she “absolutely” believes the war “has to end as soon as possible” by way of a hostage exchange deal and a cease-fire. But she made it clear “Israel has a right to defend itself” and declined to articulate any policy differences on how she would approach the war as president, including declining to answer multiple questions about the difference between defense and aggression.

“Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed — women and children. We have seen with horror the images coming out of Gaza. And we have to take that seriously,” Harris said. “But ultimately, the thing that is going to unlock everything else in that region is getting this deal done.”

She also cited her support for the pause the U.S. government put on shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel earlier this year. But other weapons continue to flow and the U.S. has shipped thousands of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel since Oct. 7, according to Reuters. The New York Times reported that weapons experts believe Israel likely used 2,000-pound bombs to strike a camp for displaced people in Gaza last week, killing at least 19 and injuring more than 60 others.

When pressed by a reporter at the event in Philadelphia, Harris declined to say whether she thought the Biden administration should’ve done more than the singular hold on bomb shipments. 

“Well, we are doing the work of putting the pressure on all parties involved to get the deal done. But let me be very clear, also: I support Israel’s ability to defend itself, and I support the need for Palestinians to have dignity, self-determination, and security as we move forward and get a two-state deal done,” Harris said. “But right now, the thing we need to get done is this hostage deal and the cease-fire deal. We need a cease-fire. We need the hostage deal.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Egypt on Wednesday as part of his latest trip to the Middle East to help negotiate a cease-fire, telling reporters that the Israeli-linked pager explosion attack on Lebanon and the escalating violence throughout the region “makes the process more difficult, might derail it.” His trip was billed in part as a chance to consult with Egypt on refining terms of a final proposal to present to Israel and Hamas.

Back in the United States, the Uncommitted National Movement made clear its dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, but urged “Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”

“Our focus remains on building a broad anti-war coalition both inside and outside the Democratic Party,” the group said. “Movements have long worked to rid the Democratic Party of hateful forces — segregationists, anti-union, anti-choice, and anti-LGBTQ proponents, the NRA, and Big Oil  — and we will work in that legacy to rid our party of AIPAC’s pro-war extremism.”

AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is a pro-Israel political committee that has pledged to spend more than $100 million in 2024 against candidates it views as insufficiently supportive of or actively in opposition to Israel. 

The Uncommitted group went on to “invite stakeholders in the Democratic Party coalition” to join its campaign to push Democratic leadership “for a stop to the illegal and morally reprehensible weapons transfers… both now and in the next administration.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.