Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN General Assembly has sparked sharp diplomatic and media reactions, with some delegates walking out of the chamber, underscoring Israel’s political isolation over the Gaza war once again.<\/p>\n
At the meeting last week, Netanyahu defended Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza and launched verbal attacks on governments and figures who have criticised Israel, including Turkey, Qatar and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He called the delegates who left the hall during his speech “moral cowards.”<\/p>\n
Burhanettin Duran, director of communications for the Turkish presidency, described Netanyahu’s remarks against Ankara and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “baseless accusations.” He said the comments could not distract attention from the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza or from international legal proceedings against the Israeli prime minister.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Majed Al Ansari, spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, rejected Netanyahu’s allegation that Doha had organised an anti-Israel campaign. He said the decline in global support for Israel, especially among young people, is the result of directly witnessing events on the ground, not influence campaigns.<\/p>\n
Al Ansari also stressed that Israeli officials must change their policies, respect international law and take responsibility for their actions if they want to change global perceptions. Hamad Al Muftah, Qatar’s deputy ambassador in Washington, also criticised Netanyahu’s speech, pointing to the large-scale walkout by delegates and rejecting his claim that Qatar finances American universities.<\/p>\n
In part of his speech, Netanyahu called New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani the “antisemitic mayor of New York” and accused him of spreading false claims about Israel. Mamdani rejected the accusation and said Netanyahu was repeating “baseless lies” to defend Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Before the speech, Mamdani had posted images of planting an olive tree alongside Palestinian families in New York, writing: “May peace be our future.”<\/p>\n
Criticism was not limited to outside Israel. Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist at Haaretz, also criticised Netanyahu’s remarks, saying he was accusing others of “barbarism” while the widespread destruction in Gaza had raised serious questions about Israel’s conduct.<\/p>\n
Referring to the deaths of Palestinian children, Levy challenged Netanyahu’s portrayal of Israel as fighting “barbarism.” He wrote that if the killing of 1,000 infants under the age of one by Israeli forces is not a sign of barbarism, then what is barbarism?<\/p>\n
The International Criminal Court also issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November 2024 on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, a matter that has also been mentioned in the latest reactions to his speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Netanyahu’s UN speech triggers backlash from Turkey, Qatar, Mamdani and Israeli critics over Gaza and ICC arrest warrant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}