WarpBeatPure news at warp speed.

Thursday, September 24, 2026 · 6:59 PM ET

Home · Politics · Sep 24 archive

Netanyahu Addresses the United Nations General Assembly

Confirmed

Politics Desk

In Short: Delegates walked out as he reached the rostrum. He told the rest they were moral cowards, then defended the strike on Iran and called the charge of genocide in Gaza the greatest lie of the century.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Photo: Avi Ohayon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday by turning on the delegates who had just walked out. "If there are any other moral cowards who haven't yet left this hall, please do so now," he said. "Thank you very much."

The walkout began as he reached the rostrum. Reuters reported that dozens of delegates left the hall. The Associated Press described scores marching out, a mix of cheers and boos, and a chamber in which a majority of the visible seats then sat empty. SBS News reported that 77 delegations left. General Assembly President Khalilur Rahman called repeatedly for order.

YouTube — ANI News YouTube

Fox News reported the walkout and Netanyahu's answer as the frame of the speech. He did not ask the delegates to stay. He told whoever still felt as they did to leave before he began.

He then returned to a line he drew at the same podium 14 years earlier. He said he had vowed to stop Iran's government from building nuclear weapons aimed at Israel and able to threaten the world, and that "that's exactly what we did." Destroying those facilities was hard, he said, and "one of the easiest decisions I've ever had to make as prime minister," because "if we hadn't done it, we'd all be dead."

He called the walkout hypocrisy. "In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall," he said. "Many of their leaders even thanked us privately for taking out Iran's nukes."

The rest of the address argued that the conflict is not about territory. He said that on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967 Israel held neither the West Bank, nor Gaza, nor the Golan Heights, and that Arab armies still threatened to destroy the state. "It's not about territories," he said. "It's about the existence of a Jewish state at any boundaries." He told Syria's president that Jews had been on the Golan "since the days of Moses."

He told the hall he was then a high school student in Philadelphia and flew home five days before the war to find his brother, Jonathan, called Yoni, a 21-year-old paratroop officer in the orange groves near Ramle. Asked what would happen, Yoni said, "We're going to win. We have no other choice." Netanyahu repeated that line through the speech. He described Yoni leading the July 4, 1976, rescue at Entebbe, in which 103 hostages were brought home and Yoni was the only Israeli soldier killed.

He set October 7, 2023, as the darkest day in Israel's history and said no Israeli soldier or civilian was in Gaza that morning. He said Hamas killed 1,200 people, "the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust," and that the toll was, for a country of 10 million, the equivalent of 40,000 Americans, "16 times 9/11." He said Israelis "fought like lions" instead of collapsing, through what he called a three-year, seven-front war: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq and Syria, and Palestinian attacks in the West Bank.

He said Israel and the United States crushed Iran's army, navy, air force, and nuclear facilities, and that every remaining hostage had been brought home. Holding up a pager, he said Hezbollah's arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles was gone, its leaders dead, and "their spirit broken." He named Khamenei, Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh, and Nasrallah among those killed.

He dismissed international focus on settler violence as a distortion. He said about 150 people throw stones, cut olive trees, and sometimes set fires, that Israel had put the Shin Bet on them, and that the deaths discussed were "maybe two or three," against thousands of attacks on Israeli civilians. He told President Emmanuel Macron of the killing of Netanel Shukrun, a French citizen and father of six, and of the wounding of Neria Leiter, son of Israel's ambassador in Washington.

He called President Donald Trump Israel's greatest partner in "this battle against the barbarians," and said American and Israeli pilots flew together over Iran. He said Iran had fired 1,000 ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, and that one one-ton missile hitting the General Assembly hall "would obliterate the entire compound."

He described an "eighth front," a war for truth in the press and on social media. He accused Qatar of spending billions to turn universities and Al Jazeera against Israel, America, and the West, and of hosting "the Hamas butchers of October 7." He called Turkey's president a tyrant, accused him of hosting Hamas chiefs, denying the Armenian genocide, jailing journalists, occupying northern Cyprus, and seeking to rule Jerusalem. "No, sir, you won't," Netanyahu said. "This is our country, our city, our eternal capital."

On Gaza, he said Hamas used civilians as shields and fought from hospitals, schools, and mosques, while Israel sent warnings by text, phone, and leaflet. "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?" He called the genocide charge "the greatest lie of the century" and "the opposite of genocide," citing Col. John Spencer of West Point's Modern War Institute for the claim that Israel had done more than any army in history to limit civilian deaths.

He then turned on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he called the city's "anti-Semitic mayor." "You try to silence me. Well, you can't silence me," he said. "Israel didn't commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide." Reuters reported that Mamdani has called Netanyahu the architect of a genocide and has denied supporting Hamas, and that Mamdani earlier said he lacked the legal power to arrest the prime minister.

He told Western European leaders they had "chosen to succumb to the anti-Semitic mobs." He held up a Starlink terminal and said he would leave it with the Assembly president for Iranian delegates "when they inevitably defect." He asked the protesters outside, and the delegates who left, where they had been "when the Iranian tyrants butchered and maimed tens of thousands of unarmed Iranian civilians," and called them "phony human rights protesters." He said Iran's government would fall, and that "we will all celebrate that day."

He closed on the same line he gave his brother. Quoting Mark Twain, and then the Bible — "The eternity of Israel will not falter" — he said the tyrannies that tried to destroy the Jews had failed, and would keep failing, "because we have no other choice."

What's confirmed

What's still developing

Sources