Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday evening, the annual gathering of world leaders in New York.
As he began speaking, dozens of delegates from around the world staged a coordinated walkout, leaving the hall and shouting jeers in his direction.
The full speech:
"Mr. President,
Before I begin, just a brief announcement:
If there are any more moral cowards here who haven't yet left this hall — please do so now.
Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Fourteen years ago I stood at this podium and drew a red line.
I vowed to prevent Iran's murderous dictatorship from developing atomic bombs, nuclear weapons designed to destroy Israel, nuclear weapons that could threaten the entire world.
That's exactly what we did.
Now let me tell you something that may surprise you.
Destroying Iran's nuclear facilities was difficult. It was very difficult to execute. But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn't done it, we would all be dead.
Now, do you want to hear the ultimate irony?
In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose representatives just left this hall!
In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for destroying Iran's nuclear program.
It's hard to imagine greater hypocrisy, but that's exactly what it is.
This is not the first time we have faced the danger of annihilation.
On June 5, 1967, Israel was surrounded by enemies who openly vowed to destroy us.
We were not then in Judea and Samaria, the heart of the Jewish people's historic homeland. We were not in Gaza. We were not in the Golan Heights.
And Mr. Guterres, you should know that Jews have been in the Golan Heights since the days of Moses. You can read about it in the Bible.
At that time, on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, we were in none of those places. We were on a tiny strip of land, and we're still there, that equals about one-third of one percent of the entire Arab world's surface area.
And still they accuse Israel of colonialism. What colonialism.
And who accuses us? Among them are people in Britain and France. For G-d's sake, they invented the term. Their colonies spanned the entire globe.
Colonialism... give me a break... another lie.
And still at that time, on that tiny strip of land, without the West Bank, without Gaza, without the Golan Heights, the very survival of this one and only Jewish state, because that's what this entire conflict is about. It's not about territories, it's about a Jewish state within any borders. And still at that time, we faced the threat of annihilation from three Arab armies poised to invade us.
Do you know what Israelis did at that time? They dug mass graves in preparation for thousands and thousands of casualties. In preparation to bury our dead.
At that time, I was an Israeli high school student in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Five days before the war broke out, I flew back to Israel.
I found a nation in complete darkness.
Israel was preparing for a blow.
I flew back to see my brother Yonatan, Yoni.
He was a 21-year-old paratrooper officer. And unlike the rest of the army, his unit had already been mobilized. I went to look for him. I was told the paratroopers were in camps in the orchards, the orange groves around Ramla. So I went there and asked some soldiers, "Do you know where Yoni Netanyahu is?" "No." "No." And then one guy said "Oh, you mean the young guy? Yeah, he's in the next grove."
So I went there, and suddenly, at the end of a long row of trees, I saw my brother.
He was completely shocked to see me.
"Bibi," he said, "what are you doing here?"
We ran, hugged each other.
Over an improvised cup of army coffee, I asked him the question that was on my heart, the question that was on everyone's heart.
"So, Yoni," I said, "what's going to happen?"
He paused. And then he said something I will never forget.
"We're going to win," he said. "We have no other choice."
I remember those words as if it were yesterday.
We're going to win. We have no other choice.
And then we won.
Nine years later, Palestinian terrorists hijacked a passenger plane en route to Israel. They took it to Entebbe, Uganda.
Like the Nazis, the terrorists separated and segregated the Jewish passengers, men, women, children, babies. They threatened to kill them all if Israel did not release Palestinian terrorists.
And then, on July 4, 1976, America's bicentennial, in one of the most dramatic rescue operations in modern times, Yoni led his brave soldiers into the heart of Africa.
Miraculously, they rescued 103 Jewish hostages and brought them all home, every single one of them.
My brother, the commander of the assault force, was the only soldier killed in that operation.
I want to thank Uganda again for recently erecting a statue of Yoni at the place where he fell.
My friends,
Yoni's words are as true today as they were more than half a century ago.
We're going to win. We have no other choice.
At no time was this illustrated more clearly than on October 7, 2023, the darkest day in Israel's history.
On that terrible day, thousands of Palestinian terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza.
I want you to know there was not a single Israeli in Gaza at that time. Not a civilian, not a soldier. Not one!
It wouldn't have mattered anyway.
Hamas terrorists carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
They went from house to house and shot Israeli civilians at point-blank range. They did so with wicked glee. With sadistic joy they broadcast live as they murdered.
And whom did they murder? Those very Israelis, their neighbors, who gave them jobs, who picked up Palestinian children from the Gaza border and drove them to Israeli hospitals for cancer treatment, and then brought them back.
Can you imagine such monstrosity?
These monsters of Hamas, they massacred Holocaust survivors. They burned babies alive in front of their parents. They beheaded our men. They brutally raped our women and then murdered them.
In total, they massacred 1,200 Israelis on that day.
I want to give you an idea of what that means for a country of 10 million people. Proportionally, that's equivalent to 40,000 innocent Americans massacred in less than 24 hours. That's 16 times September 11th. Sixteen September 11th events happening not very far from here.
On that darkest day, our enemies expected us to collapse.
Well, we didn't collapse. Instead, we rose up and fought like lions.
For the past three years, our heroic soldiers have been fighting day after day, hour after hour, in a war on seven fronts!
Do you know any other country the size of New Jersey that can fight a war on seven fronts? And for three years?
Seven fronts: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq, militias in Syria, Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria. They all banded together against us to wipe us off the face of the earth.
They failed.
Because instead of collapsing, we delivered crushing blows to all of them.
Together with our great American friends, we destroyed Iran's army, navy, air force and nuclear facilities.
Israel struck Hamas. We crushed Hezbollah.
Remember the beepers? Well, I can tell you this, Hezbollah certainly remembers them.
Guess what happened to most of Hezbollah's massive arsenal that included 150,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, all aimed at our civilians?
They're gone.
Hezbollah's leaders, dead.
Their spirit, broken.
The arch-murderers, the worst mass murderers on earth, who not only killed Israelis, killed Americans, killed Britons, killed citizens of dozens of countries, Khamenei, Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh and Nasrallah, and thousands of other terrorists who sought to destroy us, they're all gone too.
The remaining terrorists are desperately trying to regroup.
Every day they try to murder our people.
And in particular, they try to murder our people in our historic homeland, in Judea. By the way, that's where the word Jew comes from. Judea, it's our land. They try to murder us, thousands of attempts a year against families, peace-loving families driving on roads. They shoot pregnant women; they shoot entire families. Of course, none of this is covered in the international press or on social media. Not one bit. What they do cover is a handful of young offenders, about 150 in number, who throw stones, cut down olive trees, occasionally set a few fires. I cannot tolerate this. I will not tolerate taking the law into one's own hands. We are a state of law. So we deployed the Shin Bet against them. But this they call settler violence. And the number of casualties per year? Maybe two or three. In all this time that's been discussed, maybe two or three deaths. Compared to thousands of terror attacks against peace-loving settlers, decent people, law-abiding people. What distortion. It's an obsession. I hear this debate here? Leaders of countries talk about it seriously. And they say it with such gravity. "We cannot tolerate settler violence." You don't know what you're talking about.
And listen, two days ago... I'm saying this to my colleague Emmanuel Macron. Two days ago, three days ago, a French citizen Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, was shot to death while visiting a spring with his 16-year-old son. And a Hamas terrorist, in Judea and Samaria, comes and shoots him at point-blank range. And the last words he uttered, "Run, run my son. Save yourself."
That was three days ago. Two days ago, in Judea and Samaria, a reserve officer, a reserve soldier, Neriya Leitner, was cut down by a Palestinian terrorist. He's fighting for his life now in a hospital in Jerusalem.
I visited the family just before I boarded the plane to come here.
Neriya, a father of four, is the son of Yechiel Leitner, our brilliant ambassador to the United States.
Three years ago, Yechiel's eldest son, Moshe, a father of six, was killed while clearing a booby-trapped building in Gaza.
Yechiel, my brother, your pain is immeasurable.
All of Israel, and many outside Israel, are praying for Neriya's life.
But despite the pain, despite the suffering, we will not surrender.
In a recent post before he was attacked, Neriya wrote this: We have no other country. It is a privilege to defend it.
To Neriya, and to all of Israel's heroes, I make a sacred vow:
Your sacrifice will not be in vain. We will continue to defend our country. We will continue to win. Because we have no other choice.
In this battle against the barbarians, we have had no greater partner than President Trump.
I thank him for his bold leadership.
He courageously confronted enormous danger to America, to Israel and to the world.
Decades ago, he understood that if left unanswered, the fanatic ayatollahs who chant "Death to America! Death to Israel!" would eventually realize their insane delusions.
So Israel and America acted together not only to defend ourselves, but to save civilization.
Brave American pilots alongside brave Israeli pilots carried out joint missions in the skies over Iran.
America and Israel also worked together to bring back our remaining hostages.
We brought back every single one of them.
You ask, why are we winning?
Yoni said it simply. We have no other choice.
Throughout this long war, our goal has never wavered: to win!
To win with unwavering determination. To win with inexhaustible courage. Because that is Israel.
One nation fighting for one future.
Left and right. Young and old. Religious and secular.
Do we have disagreements?
Of course we do. Who doesn't?
But in critical moments, those moments that shape our destiny, we stand together, because what unites us is far stronger: our history, our values, our courage.
The courage of our brave people who withstood 1,000 massive ballistic missiles that Iran rained down on our cities, on our civilians.
Ladies and gentlemen,
You're sitting here, in the hall of the UN General Assembly. Do you know what one ton, just one ton, one ton of a ballistic missile would do if it hit this place? It would erase the entire complex. In fact, two such missiles would erase the UN.
So you can imagine, think about a thousand giant missiles falling from the sky on your cities, on your homes.
I salute the courage of the people of Israel. I salute the courage of our brave soldiers; Jews, Christians, Druze, Muslims. The most moral army in the world, the IDF.
For three years, they have been fighting heroically in a war on seven fronts.
But there is an eighth front to this war. It's the war over truth.
It is waged in the world's media, and most destructively, on social media.
Several foreign countries have spent countless billions to spread lies about my country.
The first to do so was Qatar.
Decades ago, it began massively funding American universities and toxic media outlets like Al Jazeera. They did the same thing in Europe, by the way.
Their goal was clear. To brainwash young minds to hate Israel, to hate America and to hate the West.
This is the same Qatar that hosts the butchers of Hamas from October 7th.
The latest country to become a super-spreader of antisemitic lies is Turkey.
Erdogan is a tyrant who also hosts the terror leaders of Hamas.
He has murdered thousands of Kurdish civilians. He denies the Armenian genocide. He jails journalists and opposition leaders. In fact, I think he holds the world record for that, and it's a close contest. But I think he's number one.
He illegally occupies northern Cyprus, a European Union member, and he constantly provokes Greece, a NATO member.
Now he wants to take over Syria.
It's not surprising, because he calls for Israel's destruction almost every single day. He says he's going to be the ruler of Jerusalem.
No, sir. You will not be. This is our country, our city, our eternal capital.
Tyrants around the world seek to threaten us, they seek to undermine our resolve with their campaign of lies.
But ultimately, as on the military battlefield, the Jewish people will prevail.
It will take time. It will take time to defeat the lies. It will take time until the world recognizes what is so obvious. That Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields. That it used hospitals, schools and mosques as terror headquarters. That it stole much of the food we allowed into Gaza.
While Hamas did everything it could to keep Palestinian civilians in harm's way, often at gunpoint, Israel did everything it could to get them out of harm's way.
We sent millions of text messages to warn civilians to leave combat zones.
We made millions of phone calls.
We dropped millions of leaflets.
I want to ask you some questions. What murderous regime gives a million polio vaccines to its enemy population? What murderous regime allows distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza? That's a ton per person.
To accuse Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.
If you want to know how big the lie is, if you want to know how absurd it is, listen to Lieutenant Colonel John Spencer. He is the head of urban warfare studies at West Point. He is considered the world's leading expert on urban warfare.
I think he's with us today.
Lieutenant Colonel Spencer has studied every urban war from ancient times to modern times, from ancient Greece to Mosul to Gaza.
Here's what Lieutenant Colonel Spencer says: "Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any army in history."
We took countless steps to protect the civilian population. Is this genocide? Obviously not. It's the opposite of genocide.
So to all those who spread these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they're sitting in this hall or in the office of New York's antisemitic mayor, I say this:
Shame on you.
Shame on you for distorting the facts.
Shame on you for inverting the victim and the aggressor.
Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth.
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 is not the city we remember. It has changed so fast.
It's no wonder.
You have praised criminals convicted of supporting Hamas.
You consider as friends people like Hassan Piker who said America deserved September 11th.
America deserved September 11th. What friends you have.
You invite to your home a Palestinian journalist who filmed Hamas terrorists beating and torturing Israeli hostages, and then admitted he refused to publish the videos to protect, you heard right, the terrorists!
Your wife liked a post praising the October 7th massacre.
She liked another post that said Tel Aviv should not exist.
You refused to condemn any of these things.
You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide.
Mr. Mamdani, you tried to prevent me from coming here, you tried to silence me. You cannot silence me. You cannot silence the truth.
And here is the simple truth.
Israel did not commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.
And that's exactly what Mr. Mamdani's friends from Hamas would have done to us if we hadn't stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.
The lies that you and other antisemites spread about Jews and about the Jewish state have real consequences.
In New York, Jews are attacked and threatened on their way to synagogue. Jews are stabbed in the streets. Jews are demonized. They are targeted simply for being Jews.
Jews have been murdered in Sydney, Manchester, Montreal, Boulder Colorado.
They have been attacked in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Washington D.C.
The world's antisemites want to intimidate our people.
I have news for them.
The days when Jews were helpless victims marching to slaughter,
those days are over!
Today we have a state. Today we have an army. Today we have a people ready and willing to defend itself.
So today I have one message for Jews around the world:
Lift your heads in hope. Be proud. Be confident. Do not be intimidated. Stand tall.
And to everyone else who wants to defend truth and justice, join us in standing firm against the barbarians who threaten our shared civilization.
But I must be candid with you. Not everyone is standing tall. We've seen that. Because unlike Israel there are those, and lately especially in Western Europe, who chose not to stand tall.
The leaders of those countries chose to surrender to the antisemitic mob.
They chose weakness. They chose appeasement.
We cannot escape the sad truth before us.
Many in the free world are afraid to defend freedom.
I ask them, what future is this, what is this behavior, what will the world offer you?
The fellowship of democracies or the Muslim Brotherhood?
How long will it take you to see that these fanatic jihadists are choking your shipping lanes, your energy supply, your economic lifeline?
I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, we in Israel are not waiting for others to wake up from their moral slumber.
We are marching forward. We are seizing the future. We are pioneering amazing developments in health, agriculture, artificial intelligence, "superior intelligence." And we are bringing these amazing innovations to all humanity.
Israel has never been stronger.
We are not afraid, but I'll tell you who is afraid.
The tyrants of Tehran. They are the ones who are afraid.
Do you know what they fear most?
Their own people.
The brave Iranian people who have sacrificed so much for so long.
The Iranian regime is especially afraid when its people have this. This is a communications device, Starlink, that allows people to see the truth, to exercise choice and to exercise freedom of thought and freedom of expression.
That's why the Iranian regime spends billions of dollars on internet censorship.
Mr. President, I'm going to leave this device with you so you can give it to the Iranian delegation, so when they inevitably defect, they too can freely tell their story on social media.
To the protesters outside, to the hypocritical representatives who left this hall, I ask:
Where were you when the Iranian tyrants massacred and mowed down thousands and thousands of unarmed Iranian civilians? When they massacred and mowed down thousands of their own people? Where were you?
Did you organize mass rallies? Hunger strikes?
Did you protest outside the Iranian mission to the UN?
Did you speak, for that matter, for Christians persecuted in Iran and throughout the Middle East?
No, you didn't. Because you are fake human rights protesters.
As for Christians, do you know that their numbers are plummeting everywhere in the Middle East where they are persecuted and harassed, except in one place: my country, Israel, where the Christian community is growing, thriving and succeeding.
In fact, you didn't protest when we left Bethlehem. When it was under our control it was 80-90% Christian, and we gave it to the Palestinian Authority. And today it's 80-90% Muslim. Everyone, the Christians were pushed out. Did you protest that? Did you talk about it? Nothing. Nada.
And you said nothing about Iran right now. You said nothing about Iran.
But I want to give you the good news.
Despite your silence, despite your hypocrisy, it's only a matter of time before something amazing happens in Iran. The power of the people will overcome the people in power.
I want you to listen to my words carefully:
One day, and it may not be far off, the Iranian people will be free. Their murderous regime will be toppled by its lies, by its corruption, by its cruelty.
This evil regime will fall, and we will all celebrate that day.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The story of our people, the Jewish people, goes back more than 3,000 years.
We speak the same language today that we spoke then.
We live in the same land where our ancestors lived then, David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah. This is our land.
The Land of Israel.
Our prophets, our destiny and our people are unique in history.
Our values have influenced humanity for thousands of years.
Belief in one G-d. The sanctity of life. The rule of law. Our eternal aspiration for peace. Our eternal aspiration for justice.
These are the sacred values that have driven us through the generations. These are the sacred values that have helped us overcome the odds of history.
The great American writer, Mark Twain, said it best 125 years ago. He said it long before the rebirth of the modern Jewish state, long before the great victories of Israel's soldiers.
Here's what he said:
"The Jew has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages, and has done it with his hands tied behind his back...
The Egyptian, the Babylonian and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away... Other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight...
The Jew saw them all, outlived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his spirit, no slowing of his energies..."
Ladies and gentlemen,
Throughout the centuries, the tyrannies that tried to destroy us have failed time and again.
G-d willing, they will continue to fail.
If we have courage, if we strengthen our resolve, we will continue to prevail.
As the Bible says, the Eternity of Israel will not lie.
And the reason is simple.
We have no other choice.
Thank you all.
Chag sameach to the people of Israel."
