We appreciate you following Al Jazeera for live updates from the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

To get an overview of the night’s event, check out our top takeaways here.

And hear from the protesters outside the convention hall with this on-the-ground report from Al Jazeera correspondent Ali Harb.

You can also check out our coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign with this analysis of her relationship with progressives and an in-depth look at how President Joe Biden’s support might help – or hurt – her election prospects.

Thank you for joining us!

Our live page is soon coming to a close. Here are the highlights from Monday’s opening night of the Democratic National Convention.

• President Joe Biden closed the night with a speech that framed Kamala Harris’s candidacy as critical for the future of democracy: “We’re in a battle for the very soul of America.”
• He also touted his record as the outgoing president: “We had one of the most extraordinary four years of progress ever, period.”
• The lead-up to Biden’s speech included a series of speakers who paid homage to his “lifetime of service”, including his wife Jill and daughter Ashley.
• The lineup of speakers also included NBA coach Steve Kerr, Senator Raphael Warnock and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, herself a former Democratic nominee who ran against Donald Trump in 2016.
• One of the highlights of the evening was the impassioned speech delivered by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a darling of the progressive left. She tore into Trump as a Wall Street insider who “would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets”.
• Trump’s track record on labour, abortion, COVID-19 and voting rights was a frequent target of attack during the night.

Sabrene Odeh, an uncommitted delegate from Washington state, has said Biden continues to offer “empty words”.

“What’s going to be enough is an arms embargo [on Israel] and a ceasefire” in Gaza, Odeh told Al Jazeera.

“To be quite honest with you, Biden has given us nothing but empty words for the last 10 months,” she said. “Words are not enough anymore from President Biden, we need to see action.”

As we’ve been reporting, the Biden administration has provided staunch support for Israel as the Gaza war grinds on.

Biden has closed out his speech saying he gave his “heart and soul” to the country for decades.

“I can honestly say,” he told the crowd, “I’m more optimistic about the future than I was when I was elected as a 29-year-old United States senator.”

Biden has urged Americans to go out to vote on November 5, again stressing that democracy will be on the ballot.

“We saved democracy in 2020 and now we must save it again in 2024,” he said.

He added: “I promise I’ll be the best volunteer Harris and Walz’s campaign has ever seen.”

Biden also has called for an end to the war in Gaza and said his administration is “working around the clock” to achieve a ceasefire agreement.

But the US president, a self-proclaimed Zionist, has been a staunch supporter of Israel.

His administration has vetoed three UN Security Council measures that would have called for a ceasefire. He also approved $14bn in additional military aid to Israel.

For more on Biden’s Israel policy, read our two-part series here.

The US president has briefly touched on the Gaza war protesters who have been rallying outside the Democratic National Convention to demand an end to US support for Israel.

“Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden said, without mentioning Israel or Palestinians directly.

“A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides,” he said, before pivoting to his efforts to secure the release of American captives held in Russia.

Palestinian rights advocates and other progressives in the US have dubbed Biden “Genocide Joe” to denounce his support for Israel’s Gaza war, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and decimated the coastal enclave.

“I never have, and I promise you, Kamala Harris, will never do it,” Biden has said.

He slammed Trump’s “America First” foreign policy strategy and noted that, under his administration, the US re-engaged with its global allies, including NATO.

“We united Europe like it hadn’t been united for years, adding Finland and Sweden to NATO,” Biden said.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin thought he’d take Kyiv in three days. Three years later, Ukraine is still free.”

The Democratic president has slammed his Republican predecessor for telling the world that the US is “failing”.

“He says we’re losing. He’s the loser,” Biden said to applause.

He also noted that, despite Republican claims, violent crime has dropped in the country.

“And crime will keep coming down when we put a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon,” he said.

Harris previously served as a district attorney in California. Earlier this year, Trump became the first former president ever convicted of a crime in US history.

The US president says he and Harris have helped usher in “one of the most extraordinary four years of progress ever”.

“We’ve gone from economic crisis to the strongest economy in the entire world,” Biden said.

Biden has been making an effort throughout his speech to stress the role Harris has played in his administration’s successes.

He also drew a contrast between the US vice president and Trump, her Republican rival in November.

“Donald Trump promised infrastructure week, every week, for four years – and he never built a damn thing,” Biden said.

The US president had made defending democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign before he dropped out of the 2024 race.

Echoing an argument he’s made several times before, Biden told the convention that the US is “facing an inflection point, one of those rare moments in history where the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come”.

“We’re in a battle for the very soul of America,” he said.

Trump has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election he lost to Biden was stolen from him.

Trump also has said he will respect the November election results only if they are “fair”, raising concerns he may seek to challenge the outcome should he lose to Harris.

The US president has detailed his 2021 inauguration, only weeks after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC.

“What I knew then, from the bottom of my heart, that I know now, there is no place in America for political violence – none,” Biden said from the convention stage.

“You cannot say you love your country only when you win,” he added, taking a swipe at his Republican rival and predecessor.

The US first lady says Biden had to “dig deep into his soul” when he decided to forgo his re-election bid.

The president announced late last month that he was ending his campaign amid questions about his age and ability to serve another term.

Democrats welcomed Biden’s decision, saying it was evidence of his strong character and for the greater good of the party.

“Kamala and Tim, you will win,” Jill Biden said from the convention stage. “We will fight and we will win together.”

Warnock has revisited his special election victory in a tight race in 2020 on the Democratic National Convention stage, describing it in the context of Trump’s efforts to overturn that year’s presidential race.

“The day after my January 5 election, he instigated an insurrection: a violent assault on our nation’s capital and the peaceful transfer of power, all driven by the big lie,” Warnock said, referring to the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The “big lie” has become a shorthand for Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, culminating in his 2020 defeat to President Biden.

But Warnock said Trump did not attempt simply to subvert democracy. He attempted to disenfranchise minority voters.

“Behind that lie was an even bigger lie. It is the lie that this increasingly diverse American electorate doesn’t get to determine the future of this country,” Warnock said.

“The lie and the logic of January 6 is a sickness. It is a kind of cancer that then metastasized into dozens of voter suppression laws all across our country. And we must be vigilant tonight because these anti-democratic forces are at work right now in Georgia and all across our country.”

Andy Beshear, who had been on the shortlist to be Harris’s running mate, said the vice president knows that the nation “must move beyond anger, extremism and division”.

“America, we’re going to win,” he told the crowd.

“And we’re going to win by staying true to our values of compassion, empathy and doing right by our neighbour. I’m so proud to be all-in for the next president of the United States, Kamala Harris.”

She was the 2016 nominee for the Democratic Party, and when she came in, she got rapturous applause. There was a standing ovation that went on for a long time.

People acknowledge that while she may not have won the election against Donald Trump, she certainly laid the groundwork for the moment that the Democratic Party is in right now – that is, the candidacy of Kamala Harris.

What we also saw there was a little bit of Hillary Clinton glowing in the fact that … the man who beat her in 2016 [Trump] is now finding himself struggling against the Democratic presidential nominee.

But she also is saying to Democrats, “Don’t rest on your laurels. This is still a race that’s too close to call, and so Democrats need to get out there and work to make sure that this opportunity is not squandered.”

So that was really her message.