Netanyahu at UN: Starlink Terminal for Iranians
The Israeli prime minister rejected genocide accusations over Gaza at the UN General Assembly, defended the strikes on Iran, left Iranians a Starlink terminal and called Erdogan a tyrant.
A day after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian used the same podium to show photographs of children from the city of Minab, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took his turn before the United Nations General Assembly in New York. His address, delivered on the evening of September 24, has not been covered here until now, even though we reported on both Pezeshkian’s speech and the threats US President Donald Trump directed at Iran during the same session. In his remarks, Netanyahu defended Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear program as a matter of survival, dismissed the Gaza genocide accusations as “the greatest lie of the century” and called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a tyrant.
Many delegations walked out of the General Assembly hall as soon as Netanyahu took the podium, just hours after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the gathering by video link, since the United States denied him an entry visa to New York for a second year running. Sources differ on how many delegations left or stayed away: Israel’s Ynet put the number at 77 delegations, UN News referred only to “many delegations,” while the Times of Israel reported that many Arab diplomats left the hall.
Netanyahu described the decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities as one of the easiest of his career as prime minister, and recalled his own 2012 address from the same podium, when he used a drawing of a bomb to mark a “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program.
“Destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very difficult to carry out,” Netanyahu said from the UN General Assembly podium.
He added that had Israel not struck Iran’s facilities, “we would all be dead,” presenting that assessment as the justification for June’s action.
“But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I have ever had to make as prime minister,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu dismissed the accusations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza as “the greatest lie of the century.”
“Israel did not commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide,” Netanyahu said from the podium.
As evidence, he cited Israel allowing a million polio vaccines and two million tons of food into Gaza.
“What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccines to the population of an enemy? What genocidal regime allows two million tons of food to enter Gaza?” he asked from the podium.
Health authorities in Gaza, for their part, say more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war that began with the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, while thousands of people remain missing under the rubble.
Netanyahu attributed settler violence in the West Bank to “a handful of juvenile delinquents,” claiming that such violence causes at most two or three deaths a year.
Seven fronts, and an eighth
Netanyahu said Israel has been fighting on seven fronts for three years, against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq and Syria, and Palestinian attackers in the West Bank. He named disinformation as the eighth front, accusing Qatar of funding American universities and the Al Jazeera network while hosting Hamas’s leadership, and accusing Turkey, whose president Recep Tayyip Erdogan he called a tyrant, of silencing journalists and the opposition, killing Kurdish civilians, denying the Armenian genocide and occupying northern Cyprus.
Why did he leave Iranians a Starlink terminal?
Netanyahu closed his speech with a gesture aimed at Iran: he held up a Starlink satellite internet terminal and said he was leaving it with the president of the General Assembly to be handed to the Iranian delegation, as a symbol of access to free information beyond the censorship of the regime in Tehran. He predicted that the Iranian people would, in his words, eventually topple their own government.
Netanyahu also addressed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani directly, calling him an antisemite.
“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to prevent me from coming here. You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth,” Netanyahu said, addressing the mayor from the podium.
Outside UN headquarters, demonstrators hanged an effigy of the Israeli prime minister during the speech, while several hundred people marched through the streets of New York.
Netanyahu’s appearance thus closed out, after Pezeshkian’s speech and Trump’s threats toward Iran, the third angle on the same General Assembly session, dominated by the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program and the war in Gaza. Reactions from European capitals to his remarks are expected in the coming days of the session, which runs in New York through the end of September.
