TEL AVIV — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded his country’s case to the world at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday before an audience of mostly empty seats.
But the audience Netanyahu was really trying to reach was closer to home: Israeli voters ahead of next month’s crucial elections.
As Netanyahu stepped up to the lectern, hundreds of diplomats showed their disdain for Israel’s bloody crackdown on Palestinians in Gaza by rising from their seats and walking out en masse.
Netanyahu responded with similar disdain. “If there are any more moral cowards who haven’t left the hall, please do so now,” he said.
U.N. delegates walk out as Netanyahu begins his address
Then Netanyahu went on to revisit Hamas’ attacks on Israel in October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and which sparked the latest round of fighting.
Netanyahu also defended the ongoing war on Iran in existential terms. “If we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead,” he said.
“We will continue to defend our state. We will continue to win because we have no other choice,” he said.
Netanyahu thanked President Donald Trump for taking Israel’s side in what he called a “battle against the barbarians.”
And, as expected, he accused New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani of antisemitism and cozying up to what he said were his Hamas “buddies.”
“You can’t silence me,” he said, addressing Mamdani. “You can’t silence the truth.”
Mamdani said in a statement later that Netanyahu “used his 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,” he said.
Netanyahu also took swipes at Qatar and Turkey, accusing them of spreading antisemitism and false information about Israel to the world. And he attacked critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza, which have resulted in the deaths of more than 75,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials.
“Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century,” he said.
Netanyahu also suggested that soaring settler violence in the West Bank, a growing threat to Palestinian communities there, was the work of “a handful of young juvenile delinquents.”
Netanyahu arrived in New York on a whirlwind trip that highlighted Israel’s growing isolation over its assault on the Gaza Strip.
With only a handful of diplomatic meetings on the sidelines of the assembly and Trump’s focus firmly on his summit with China’s Xi Jinping, Netanyahu was expected to return to Israel shortly after his address to be back in time for the major Jewish holiday of Sukkot on Friday evening.
“I am leaving tonight for New York in order to defend, from the U.N. podium, Israel and IDF soldiers,” he said in a video Wednesday night before he left. “You hear the terrible lies that are being spread there.”
Netanyahu was anticipating that the delegates would, as they have in years before, walk out in protest over the conduct of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. But that spectacle was also likely to play well with his domestic supporters, for whom he has styled himself as a defiant truth-teller standing up for Israel on the global stage.
While much of the world has condemned Israel for the huge loss of civilian life and the continuing humanitarian tragedy in Gaza, Netanyahu’s primary domestic challenge comes from an Israeli right wing that accuses him of not being tough enough in the multifront war on Iran and its proxy groups.
“The main reason that brings him to the UN General Assembly this time is the opportunity to talk, using the UN microphone, to his voters in Israel, in his polished English, in a speech that of course will be accompanied by exaggerated descriptions of his great achievements,” Ephraim Ganor, a political and strategic affairs expert, wrote in the right-leaning Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv.
Before he delivered the speech, Netanyahu hinted that he would focus on populist, patriotic causes.
In a video Tuesday on social media, Netanyahu took aim at Mamdani, who had pledged to arrest him for crimes against humanity before he later acknowledged that he lacked jurisdiction.
Appearing to adopt the posture of a professional wrestler and looking straight into the camera, Netanyahu accused Mamdani of supporting Hamas — which Mamdani has strenuously denied — and fomenting riots against New York Jews. He added that he would “tell the truth about you” and “tell the truth about our heroic soldiers.”
Netanyahu’s mention of Israeli soldiers appeared to be a reference to “NAZA,” a documentary made by two Israeli filmmakers in which 24 anonymous Israelis, described as military and intelligence officials, talk about the cynical process by which the country’s military evaluated the need for civilian deaths during the Gaza war.
A popular target that has riled Israeli leaders ahead of the elections, “NAZA” has earned plaudits abroad but condemnation at home.
Politicians have stumbled over themselves to publicly condemn the documentary in the harshest terms, with some demanding a criminal investigation into the duo and even that they be stripped of Israeli citizenship.
Netanyahu, who has a history of peppering his General Assembly speeches with props, gags and gimmicks, said his speech would include “surprises.”
For this speech, Netanyahu held up a pager similar to the explosive-laden devices the Israelis used to kill dozens of Hezbollah supporters in 2024.
“Remember the beepers? Remember these things? Remember them?” Netanyahu said. “Well, I can tell you this, Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”
Netanyahu also taunted the Iranian delegates with a Starlink satellite internet device, telling them that “when they inevitably defect, they, too, will be able to freely tell their story on social media.”
Last year, he told the audience that his speech was being broadcast into Gaza through massive loudspeakers and streamed to mobile phones so Israeli hostages trapped in Gaza could hear him speak.
He also wore an oversized QR code on his jacket, encouraging audiences to activate the code to visit a website with a video showing Hamas’ attacks on Israel in October 2023.
In the years before that, Netanyahu brandished regional maps to make his points. Two years ago, he displayed two maps that showed the “blessing” of Israel’s influence contrasted with the “curse” of Iran’s expanding power.
And in 2012, more than a decade before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in what they said was an attempt to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon, Netanyahu held up a cartoon image of an Iranian nuclear weapon with a “red line” for its maximum enrichment level.
Matt Bradley reported from Tel Aviv and Corky Siemaszko from New York City.
