Netanyahu, his voice rising in emphasis, said attacking Iran “was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make” and denounced as “moral cowards” a mass of delegates who walked out of the U.N. General Assembly when he took the podium to speak.
“In defending itself, Israel is also also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall,” Netanyahu said. “In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.”
As part of his speech, Netanyahu reminded the assembly of the scale of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which Iran-backed Hamas terrorists massacred more than 1,200 Jewish men, women and children. “This is equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours,” he said, or 16 times the death count on the 9/11 attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead in New York.
Netanyahu, who is prone to using visual aids during his General Assembly speeches, at one point held up a pager while reminding the audience of Sept. 17, 2024, when Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers that had been distributed to the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon. The pager attack wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12.
Netanyahu also used his speech to accuse Mayor Zohran Mamdani of endangering Jewish New Yorkers with his criticism of Israel's military actions in Gaza, saying the mayor has spread lies about Israel.
Mamdani, a Muslim, has called Netanyahu a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.”
During his speech, Netanyahu responded to those claims saying “Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York. They talk to me, they tell me ‘this isn’t the city we remember, it changed so quickly."
