Once again, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, resorting to the same language riddled with lies, manipulation, denials, and abuse.
This time, however, the UNGA hall was almost empty, with only a handful of delegations and a few of Netanyahu’s own ‘guests,’ who tried in vain to drown out the protests with exaggerated clapping and cheers.
Yet the look on Netanyahu’s face told the whole story. He appeared visibly exhausted, pausing at times, glancing around in bewilderment, before pressing on with his address.
Netanyahu’s remarks combined grandiose claims about Israel’s military triumphs with sweeping denials of atrocities in Gaza, framed under the banner of “self-defence”.
He lashed out at Western leaders who have recently recognised Palestine and, at one point, declared that his objective was to “make Iran great again”. Yet when examined against the evidence, much of what he presented collapses. Here are a few examples.
On Gaza
Starting with Gaza. Netanyahu insisted that “Israel has let into Gaza more than two million tonnes of food and aid… nearly 3,000 calories per person per day.” This unsubstantiated claim was meant to counter mounting reports of famine. But the opposite is true.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine in Gaza in August 2025, estimating that food availability averages only around 1,400 calories per person per day — well below the survival level.
Additionally, reports from the World Food Programme and other UN agencies describe aid convoys blocked at crossings and humanitarian access deliberately restricted. Far from generosity, what Israel imposed is a deliberate policy of starvation.
Netanyahu attempted to deflect responsibility by claiming that Hamas had looted “85 percent of the aid trucks,” citing the United Nations.
According to reputable sources, however, the UN has never made such a statement. “Pro-Israeli internet users claim that the UN has stated that 87 percent of humanitarian aid entering Gaza is being looted by Hamas. No, the UN did not say that,” France24 reported on August 28.
Netanyahu also tried to defend the staggering civilian toll of the war, claiming that “the ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties is less than 2:1,” which he described as “astoundingly low.”
Yet Israeli intelligence data obtained by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call tell a very different story: by May 2025, 83 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians — roughly five civilians for every fighter.
UN monitoring confirms the same trend. In a war that has killed over 200,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, Netanyahu’s statistics were not simply misleading; they were designed to conceal the truth.
Another line repeated throughout the speech was that “Hamas uses civilians as human shields.” This well-worn justification has been invoked in nearly every Israeli assault on Gaza.
But UN and human rights groups’ inquiries have found no evidence that Palestinian fighters systematically use civilians in this way.
What has been documented again and again is Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of homes, schools, refugee camps, and hospitals. The human shield narrative is less a description of battlefield reality than a rhetorical shield against accusations of genocide.
‘Victory’ against Iran
Then there was Iran. One of Netanyahu’s most dramatic assertions was that Israeli and American pilots had “removed an existential threat” by striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and had even taken “control of the skies over Tehran” during the 12-day war last June.
The picture he painted was of a decisive victory that eliminated the ‘danger’ of an Iranian nuclear programme.
In reality, the strikes neither destroyed Iran’s nuclear programme nor secured Israeli dominance, according to international inspectors and analysts who have confirmed that Iran has since intensified work at hardened underground facilities.
Worthy of mention is that the Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would have been impossible without direct American involvement.
Using B-2 bunker-buster bombs, the US struck Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities on June 22. Even then, according to the New York Times, “the bombs probably did not reach the chamber holding the centrifuges critical to Iran's nuclear program”.
The myth of Israel seeking peace
Finally, Netanyahu repeated a familiar refrain: “Israel has always sought peace; Palestinians always rejected it.” This inversion of reality ignores the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offered Israel full normalisation with the entire Arab world in exchange for withdrawal from occupied land. Palestinians endorsed it. Israel rejected it.
It also overlooks the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, which Palestinians entered into in the hope of statehood, only to watch Israel expand its illegal settlements, entrench its military occupation, and delay every promised step of the process.
Rather than paving the way to ‘peace’, Oslo created a system that fragmented Palestinian politics and territory, while Israel consolidated its control.
Since then, illegal settlement expansion, annexation of East Jerusalem, and the blockade of Gaza have only intensified. If peace remains elusive, it is not because Palestinians reject it, but because Israel’s policies are designed to foreclose it.
Every time Netanyahu returns to the UNGA podium, the number of Palestinians killed, wounded, and maimed — the number of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and trees destroyed — has made a massive jump.
Between the last two speeches, that jump amounted to tens of thousands of dead and wounded, and to a scale of destruction unfamiliar in modern warfare.
Yet, while Palestinians are barred from the UN, thanks to Washington’s abuse of power, it is Netanyahu who stands there — insulting the world, pointing fingers, raging against supposed “anti-Semitism,” and presenting himself as a prophet of peace.
What sets this speech apart from those that came before, however, is that the world is undergoing a historical awakening. Not only governments, civil society organisations, and human rights groups, but also ordinary people across the globe are finally able to see Israel for what it is — a genocidal regime — and Netanyahu for who he is: a pathological liar, and worse, a wanted war criminal.
The question is whether this awakening will come fast enough to save the lives of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and to hold Israeli war criminals accountable for the genocide they have carried out over the past two years.
