People protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the day of his address to the 81st U.N. General Assembly in New York, Sept. 24, 2026. (Credit: Charly Triballeau/AFP)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, isolated on the international stage and in the midst of a difficult reelection campaign, on Thursday delivered an indictment of Israel's critics as international condemnation mounts over the violence committed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Daily Israeli strikes also continue in Gaza and southern Lebanon despite cease-fires.
"They accuse Israel, tiny Israel, of colonialism — some colonialism. And who's accusing us? Among them are people in Britain and in France. For God's sakes, they invented the term," he told the U.N. General Assembly, adding that "their colonies covered the entire planet."
As was the case last year, dozens of delegation members left the room as Netanyahu began to speak, in a protest organized by the Palestinian mission to the U.N. "If there are still moral cowards left in this room who haven’t walked out, let them do so now," he declared before starting his speech.
Some envoys jeered and booed as they walked out, while Netanyahu’s team stood and applauded and the session’s presiding officer called for order.
Netanyahu arrived in New York in the morning and is set to return immediately afterward, wrapping up a whirlwind visit of less than 24 hours. Unusually, no meetings with American officials are on his agenda.
The absence of such meetings, reported by Israeli media, contrasts with his five-day visit to the United States in 2025 at the invitation of U.S. President Donald Trump. According to two Israeli officials, Netanyahu was scheduled to spend less than eight hours in New York before returning to Tel Aviv. His office announced that he would meet nine foreign leaders, including five Latin American officials.
His speech came the day after a ramming attack in the occupied West Bank in which the son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, was seriously injured. According to Leiter, his son, who is a reservist in the Israeli army, is still "in danger" of dying.
'The spirit of Hezbollah is broken'
Netanyahu said Israel was fighting on "seven fronts": against "Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq, militias in Syria" and Palestinians in the West Bank.
"All have banded together against us to wipe us off the face of the Earth. They have failed, because rather than collapse, we struck all of them with devastating blows," he said. Referring to Israel’s wars against Hezbollah in 2023 and 2026, he declared: "We have crushed Hezbollah."
Before downplaying Israeli settler violence in the West Bank or calling accusations that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza "the lie of the century," Netanyahu referred to the Sept. 17, 2024, attack on Hezbollah’s pagers.
"Remember the pagers? Do you remember them? Well, I can tell you one thing: Hezbollah certainly does," he said, brandishing a pager. "Guess what happened to the rest of Hezbollah's immense arsenal, which had 150,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, all aimed at our civilians? They disappeared. Hezbollah’s leaders are dead. Their spirit is broken," he added.
The operation involved pagers rigged by Mossad and widely used by the party. Thousands of the devices exploded, killing people and injuring thousands.
Israeli intelligence reportedly fitted the devices with explosives before shipping them to operatives of the Iran-backed group. The explosions maimed hundreds of Hezbollah operatives as well as civilian bystanders.
Hezbollah twice opened a front against Israel: in October 2023 in support of Gaza, and again in March 2026 to avenge the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The Israeli army responded with massive offensives in Lebanon, killing more than 9,000 people over three years. Israeli forces have also occupied more than 600 square kilometers of southern Lebanon since the second war and destroyed dozens of villages there.
He also spoke at length about the confrontation with Iran and thanked Trump for his "bold leadership" in launching the war with a joint attack Feb. 28 to "prevent the murderous [Iranian] dictatorship from acquiring nuclear weapons."
Netanyahu said he and the United States had prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. "I vowed to prevent the murderous Iranian dictatorship from developing atomic bombs, nuclear weapons meant to destroy Israel, nuclear weapons that could threaten the entire world," he said. He also predicted that the Iranian regime would "eventually fall."
He said that fall was not "far." Iran’s U.N. envoy displayed a portrait of slain Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani on the delegation’s vacant desk.
Israeli and U.S. forces have attacked Iran for nearly seven months. Despite the onslaught, Iran’s government has retained control and continues to defy the United States by effectively blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
Netanyahu also responded to criticism from leaders who had addressed the assembly the previous day.
"Know this, Mr. Sharaa, that Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the time of Moses," he said, addressing Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who had reaffirmed Syrian sovereignty over the territory, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981.
"Erdogan is a tyrant. He also harbors Hamas terrorists," Netanyahu continued, responding to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had accused him of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
He accused Turkey of backing Hamas, the Iran-backed Islamist group.
Protest in NY
Dozens of protesters gathered along First Avenue, which runs beside U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, chanting, "Netanyahu, you cannot hide, you are wanted for genocide."
Some carried banners reading "stop the genocide."
Several protesters were detained, including actress Susan Sarandon.
Before his trip, Netanyahu had promised to "tell the truth" about New York's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whom he accuses of supporting Hamas. Mamdani, a member of the left wing of the Democratic Party and a longtime activist for the Palestinian cause, accuses the Israeli prime minister of "genocide." Earlier this year, the New York mayor said he was considering arresting Netanyahu at the U.N. summit before admitting he was not in a position to execute an International Criminal Court warrant targeting the prime minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The court, based in The Hague, said in 2024 that it had reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu was responsible for war crimes in the Gaza campaign launched in response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Netanyahu denies the court’s allegations.
Mamdani had also declared that "Netanyahu was not welcome" in New York. Responding to the mayor’s criticism of Israeli policy, Netanyahu said: "Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here. You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me, you can’t silence the truth. And here is the simple truth: Israel did not commit genocide. Israel prevented a genocide," referring to the Israeli people.
Netanyahu also called Mamdani, a popular leftist and New York’s first Muslim mayor, "antisemitic."
"Since you were elected in this city, many Jews no longer feel safe," Netanyahu also said.
On Thursday, Mamdani replied that "no lie" from Netanyahu "changes the fact that he remains subject to an arrest warrant."
"Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians," Mamdani said.
Campaigning ahead of the Oct. 27 legislative elections, Netanyahu, head of the most right-wing government in Israel's history, has launched his country into a war on multiple fronts — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran — and stepped up settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, where settler violence has multiplied since the bloody Hamas attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
He described extremist Jewish settlers as "a handful of young delinquents," saying about 150 "throw stones, uproot olive trees" and attributing only "two or three fatal victims" to them. According to the latest available figures from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli soldiers or settlers have killed at least 88 Palestinians, including 22 children, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since Jan. 1, 2026. This brings the death toll from these attacks in the West Bank to more than 1,100 since Oct. 7, 2023.
An AFP tally based on Palestinian Health Ministry figures also puts the number of Palestinians killed by the army and settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023, at more than 1,100, including fighters and civilians. According to Israeli figures, nearly 50 Israelis, including civilians and security personnel, have been killed in the same period and area in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations.
'Colonial project'
Speaking before Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, forced to speak by video after being denied a U.S. visa, said Israeli policies were no longer merely undermining the two-state solution but now threatened "the very life and existence" of his people.
"What is taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not isolated incidents but a malicious colonial project aimed at making life increasingly difficult for Palestinians in their homeland and forcing them to leave," he said.
Speaking a few hours before Netanyahu, Abbas also accused Israel of waging a "genocidal war" against Palestinians in Gaza and protecting "settler terrorism" in the West Bank.
The Palestinian leader also railed against the U.S. decision to once again deny him entry to American soil, denouncing "punitive measures with no legal basis."
"We reject these unlawful punitive measures, and we reject the accusations and justifications on which they were based," he said of the Trump administration’s visa refusal.
'Grotesque absurdity'
Netanyahu’s speech came as several foreign leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, used the U.N. podium this week to criticize Israeli government policy.
Britain and France, longtime partners of Israel, have become increasingly outspoken in their criticism. Both have imposed limited sanctions on Israeli exports from the occupied West Bank.
The French president lamented the humanitarian situation in Gaza. "What credibility do we have if we continue to remain inactive in the face of Gaza?" he said, also criticizing Israeli actions in the West Bank, where, he noted, "Hamas has never operated." Israel responded sharply, denouncing the "grotesque absurdity" of Macron’s comments.
Last year at the U.N., France and Saudi Arabia spearheaded recognition of a Palestinian state, hoping to advance a two-state solution that seems increasingly uncertain on the ground.
Many Western countries, including Canada, France and the United Kingdom, have for months denounced the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and imposed sanctions against Israel.
The United States, for its part, refuses to appear publicly critical of Israel but says it opposes violence and any annexation of Palestinian territory by Israel.
7 p.m. update: Salam defends Lebanon's sovereignty in UN speech; Iran proposes reopening Hormuz; Air France resumes flights to Beirut