Protests and walkouts eclipse Netanyahu's UN appearance

The scene in New York — empty UN rows, diplomatic walkouts and sustained street protests, including large marches from Times Square to the UN and demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s Manhattan hotel — crystallized the political cost of the address.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday was an attempt at a carefully staged and combative defense of Israel’s aggressive campaign in Gaza and its wider military actions across the region. Yet the performance could not mask the widening gulf between his narrative and the findings of international institutions, public-health agencies, and human-rights organizations.

Netanyahu employed one prominent map, alongside visual aids and rhetorical flourishes critics deemed theatrical props, and he repeated the phrase “Israel must finish the job.”

The line landed amid visible diplomatic rebuke - dozens of delegations staged walkouts and large sections of the Assembly remained conspicuously empty, while thousands of demonstrators in New York took to the streets demanding a ceasefire and accountability.

Independent UN mechanisms and leading rights groups have drawn a far grimmer picture than the one Netanyahu offered. In a September report, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that the Israeli conduct in Gaza meets the legal threshold of genocide.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented patterns of indiscriminate bombardment, forced displacement, and the deliberate deprivation of essential services that they say amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Public-health agencies and UN partners, drawing on figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, estimate that more than 65,500 people have been killed since October 2023.

The war has forced the displacement of up to 90 percent of the population, while famine conditions have taken hold in several areas. The World Health Organization has confirmed hundreds of deaths from malnutrition, many of them children.

Beyond Gaza, Israel’s military actions have extended across the region, with deadly strikes in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, where more than 1,065 people were killed in the 12-Day War. Attacks have also targeted sites in Qatar and other parts of West Asia, widening the conflict’s footprint and drawing condemnation for what critics describe as a campaign of destabilization.

Netanyahu sought to rebut such charges by pointing to evacuation orders and intelligence claims, and by portraying Iran as the backbone of a regional “terror axis.”

Those assertions did not persuade critics who point out that warnings alone cannot absolve a belligerent of responsibility for operations that hit hospitals, shelters, and schools or that substantially hinder lifesaving aid.

The repeated refrain to “finish the job” in an enclave of nearly two million civilians risks being read not as a constrained military objective but as justification for actions with catastrophic humanitarian and legal consequences.

A particularly contentious decision during the UN appearance was the transmission of the speech into Gaza via loudspeakers on the border and, according to multiple reports, through mobile devices.

Framed by Tel Aviv as communication aimed at captives, the broadcasts were described by many humanitarian advocates and Palestinian journalists as coercive psychological pressure imposed on a population already under bombardment and facing starvation.