Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu signaled to the world from the United Nations on Friday that the multiple conflicts in the Middle East were far from resolved, and he vowed to continue battling the Lebanese Hezbollah and defeat Hamas in the Gaza Strip until “total victory."
On Thursday, the leader of the Palestinian Authority and a top Lebanese official both made their cases to fellow leaders — cases that included harsh words for Israel as well. Mahmoud Abbas' first words to the General Assembly were a sentence repeated three times in reference to Gaza: “We will not leave. We will not leave. We will not leave.”
On Thursday, the leader of the Palestinian Authority and a top Lebanese official both made their cases to fellow leaders — cases that included harsh words for Israel as well. Mahmoud Abbas' first words to the General Assembly were a sentence repeated three times in reference to Gaza: “We will not leave. We will not leave. We will not leave.”
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00:00We will not leave, we will not leave, we will not leave.
00:21Palestine is our homeland, it is the land of our fathers and grandfathers, and it will
00:28remain for us.
00:29And if anyone should leave, it is the occupiers who will be the ones to leave.
00:36In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
00:42Mr. Philemon Young, President of the United Nations General Assembly.
00:48Mr. António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations.
00:55Ladies and gentlemen, heads and members of the delegation, distinguished guests.
01:01May the peace, mercy, and blessings of God be upon you.
01:06I come to you today, and my people have been subjected for almost a year now to a crime
01:15that is one of the most heinous crimes of our time.
01:20A crime of total war and mass extermination committed by Israel, the state of occupation.
01:29A crime that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza so far.
01:39And thousands are still under the rubble, as more than 100,000 others have been wounded
01:48to this day.
01:50And things are happening.
01:52And hundreds of families have been forced to immediately impose punishments on them.
01:59The mass murders, crimes, and mass extermination committed by Israel against our people since
02:061948 until this day.
02:11This will not pass without reckoning.
02:15And it will not fall with progress.
02:19What has been lost is a right that is being pursued.
02:24And despite our persistent and repeated demands, the world has not succeeded in forcing Israel,
02:31the powerful state, to stop mass extermination and war crimes against innocent civilians.
02:40The US administration, the most democratic state in the world, has interrupted three times
02:52the security council's decisions calling for Israel to stop fighting and start a fire.
03:00But the US is not alone.
03:02It has stopped and said that it will continue to fight by using the Veto.
03:09And on top of that, it has provided Israel with the deadly weapons that have killed thousands
03:16of civilians and innocent children and women.
03:20And this is what has encouraged Israel to continue its aggression.
03:25If the US administration encourages it, why doesn't it continue its aggression?
03:31These are the United States, the same one that was the only member in the Security Council
03:38that also voted against the State of Palestine, the entire membership.
03:44We do not deserve the entire membership in the eyes of the US.
03:48So they stopped and used the Veto.
03:50I do not understand how the United States insists on standing up against our people
03:57and insists on depriving them of their legitimate rights to freedom and independence
04:02like the rest of the world's people, 194 countries.
04:05We are like them.
04:09Ladies and gentlemen, order.
04:12Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I didn't intend to come here this year.
04:23My country is at war, fighting for its life.
04:30But after I heard the lies and slanders leveled at my country by many of the speakers at this podium,
04:41I decided to come here and set the record straight.
04:46I decided to come here to speak for my people, to speak for my country, to speak for the truth.
05:03And here is the truth.
05:09Israel seeks peace.
05:12Israel yearns for peace.
05:15Israel has made peace and will make peace again.
05:23Yet we face savage enemies who seek our annihilation.
05:28And we must defend ourselves against these savage murderers.
05:34Our enemies seek not only to destroy us.
05:39They seek to destroy our common civilization and return all of us to a dark age of tyranny and terror.
05:48When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice
05:55that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago.
06:00As we were about to enter the Promised Land,
06:03Moses told us that our actions will determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.
06:13And that is the choice we face today.
06:17The curse of Iran's unremitting aggression or the blessing of a historic reconciliation between Arab and Jew.
06:26The curse of October 7th began when Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza.
06:31But it didn't end there.
06:34Israel was soon forced to defend itself on six more war fronts organized by Iran.
06:40I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran.
06:43If you strike us, we will strike you.
06:48There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach.
07:03And that's true of the entire Middle East.
07:06Far from being lambs led to the slaughter, Israel's soldiers have fought back with incredible courage and with heroic sacrifice.
07:17And I have another message for this assembly and for the world outside this hall.
07:22We are winning!
07:26Hamas kidnapped 251 people from dozens of different countries, dragging them into the dungeons of Gaza.
07:34Israel has brought home 154 of these hostages, including 117 who returned alive.
07:43I want to assure you, we will not rest until the remaining hostages are brought home too.
07:49This swamp of anti-Semitic bile.
07:53There's an automatic majority willing to demonize the Jewish state on anything.
07:59In this anti-Israel, flat-earth society, any false charge, any outlandish allegation can muster a majority.
08:08In the last decade, there have been more resolutions passed against Israel in this hall at the UN General Assembly than against the entire world combined.
08:20Actually, more than twice as many.
08:24Since 2014, this body condemned Israel 174 times.
08:30It condemned all the other countries in the world 73 times.
08:35That's more than 100 extra condemnations for the Jewish state.
08:41What hypocrisy. What a double standard. What a joke.
08:46So all the speeches you heard today, all the hostility directed at Israel this year, it's not about Gaza.
08:53It's about Israel. It's always been about Israel.
08:57About Israel's very existence.
09:02And I say to you, until Israel, until the Jewish state is treated like other nations, until this anti-Semitic swamp is drained,
09:11the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce.
09:20Now given the anti-Semitism at the UN, it should surprise no one that the prosecutor at the ICC, one of the UN's affiliated organs,
09:30is considering issuing arrest warrants against me and Israel's defense minister, the democratically elected leaders of the democratic state of Israel.
09:42The ICC prosecutors rush to judgment.
09:45His refusal to treat Israel with its independent courts the way other democracies are treated is hard to explain by anything other than pure anti-Semitism.
09:57But I have a message for you.
09:59Israel will win this battle.
10:02We'll win this battle because we don't have a choice.
10:07After generations in which our people were slaughtered, remorselessly butchered, and no one raised a finger in our defense,
10:20we now have a state, we now have a brave army, an army of incomparable courage, and we are defending ourselves.
10:28To the people of Israel and to the soldiers of Israel, I say, be strong and of good courage.
10:36Chizku v'imtsu v'alti ra'u mipnehem, ki Adonai Elohecha hu aholech imecha, lo yarapecha v'lo ya'azvecha.
10:45Am Yisrael chai, the people of Israel live, now, tomorrow, forever.