Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gave a combative speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday in which he defended the wars in Gaza and in Iran as a “battle against barbarians” and accused his country’s many critics of being hypocrites.
Directly addressing the protesters who were outside the building, he demanded to know where they had been when Iranian security forces killed thousands of people demonstrating against the regime in Tehran in January.
“Did you organize mass rallies, hunger strikes?” Mr. Netanyahu asked. “Did you protest outside the Iranian mission to the U. N.? Did you speak out, for that matter, for Christians persecuted in Iran and throughout the Middle East? No, no, you didn’t do that. Because you’re phony human rights protesters.”
Mr. Netanyahu also directly criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, the city’s first Muslim leader, who has called Mr. Netanyahu a “war criminal” and at one time called for him to be arrested.
“To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York, I say this: Shame on you!” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Shame on you for distorting the facts. Shame on you for inverting victim and aggressor. Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth.”
Mr. Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly just hours after the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, delivered a recorded video address in which he condemned Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank as “a malicious colonial scheme” aimed at forcing Palestinians to leave their homeland. He urged world leaders to restrain Israel and “ensure the viability of the two-state solution.”
“We seek a democratic Palestinian state that respects the rule of law and human rights, a non-militarized state that lives in security and peace alongside the state of Israel,” Mr. Abbas said. “It is possible.”
The dueling speeches cast into stark relief the sharp divisions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as Israel’s increasing isolation on the world stage.
Mr. Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, did not appear in person because, for the second year in a row, the Trump administration refused to grant him a visa to travel to New York.
The State Department accused Palestinian officials of trying to “internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” including by seeking to bring cases to international tribunals. In response, the U.N.’s 193 members voted last week, as they did last year, to allow Mr. Abbas to send a videotaped speech.
When Mr. Netanyahu took the podium, he was greeted with boos, and many of the diplomats in the hall walked out, as they did last year. Supporters of the Israeli leader, meanwhile, began chanting, “Am Yisrael Chai,” a popular refrain meaning “the people of Israel live.”
“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
At times pounding the lectern and raising his voice, Mr. Netanyahu took aim at those with whom Israel has clashed militarily: Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and their allied forces in Yemen and Iraq. But he also spent considerable time assailing Mayor Mamdani, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Western European leaders who, he said, “have chosen to succumb to the antisemitic mob.”
U.N. General Assembly: Live Updates
Updated
- Amid protests, Netanyahu castigates his foes and the mayor of New York.
- Netanyahu attacks Mamdani in a heated U.N. speech.
- Abbas presses the case for a Palestinian state in a videotaped address.
In response to Mr. Netanyahu’s attacks, Mr. Mamdani accused the prime minister of using his U.N. speech “to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”
“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” the mayor said.
Minutes before Mr. Netanyahu spoke, Mr. Mamdani released a wordless, minute-long video that showed him planting an olive tree at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, and dining there with Palestinian families from Gaza.
“May peace be our future,” Mr. Mamdani wrote in a social media post accompanying the video.
Outside the United Nations, the police arrested protesters who were blocking an intersection at 39th Street and First Avenue, not far from the General Assembly hall, and chanting, “It is right to rebel; Netanyahu go to hell.” The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and attracted hundreds of demonstrators who wore shirts that read, “Fund people not bombs.”
Mr. Abbas assailed the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, calling it “a genocidal war that has created an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.” He also condemned Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, where he said settler attacks on Palestinians and the demolition of Palestinian homes, checkpoints and raids have been carried out under a policy of “racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing and state terrorism.”
“The danger is no longer limited to undermining the two-state solution and preventing the realization of the Palestinian state,” he said. “It has now come to threaten the very life and existence of the Palestinian people on their own land.”
Mr. Netanyahu cast Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, whose presence much of the world considers an illegal encroachment onto land destined for a Palestinian state, as mostly peaceful neighbors and victims of Palestinian violence.
He also rejected claims that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
“What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population?” he asked. “What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza? That’s a ton for every person. Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.”
Mr. Netanyahu recounted the horror of Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas-led attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel and led to the abduction of about 250 hostages to Gaza, violence that he said had been carried out “with fiendish glee, with sadistic joy.”
“We didn’t collapse,” he said. “We rose and fought like lions.”
In the ensuing Israeli military attacks in Gaza, more than 70,000 people were killed, according to Gaza health officials, and much of the enclave was reduced to rubble, leading to international accusations, including by a U.N. commission, that Israel was committing genocide.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Netanyahu and Israel’s former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza. The court also issued a warrant for a Hamas leader, Muhammad Deif. He was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu is now facing a tough re-election campaign, and his political future is uncertain. His speech at the U.N., analysts said, was at least in part directed at the audience back home.
In his address, he cast the war that he and President Trump launched against Iran seven months ago, partly on the grounds that Iran must be prevented from developing nuclear weapons, in the most dire, existential terms.
“It’s one of the easiest decisions I’ve had to make as prime minister, because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead,” he said. He added, “Israel and America acted together, not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilization.”
Mr. Netanyahu vowed that Israel would continue to fight against Iran and its allied militias in the Middle East “because we have no other choice.”
Reporting was contributed by Liam Stack, Miles G. Cohen and Richard Pérez-Peña.
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