Dozens Walk Out as Netanyahu Calls His Critics 'Moral Cowards'
Israel’s prime minister addressed a half-empty General Assembly as dozens of delegates walked out, jeering, and his own delegation stood chanting in Hebrew. “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t left this hall, please do so now,” he said, before a forty-minute defence of the war: “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.” He attacked New York’s mayor by name. No meeting with Mr Trump was arranged.
The audience was not in the room. The speech ran live in evening prime time across all four main Israeli television channels, five weeks before the election on 27 October, and his own office confirmed the government had paid for 500 pro-Israel billboards and dozens of message trucks across Manhattan. The props followed the same logic — a pager recalling the 2024 attack on Hezbollah, and a Starlink receiver he said he would leave behind for the Iranian delegation. He dismissed settler violence in the West Bank as “a handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number”. Zohran Mamdani replied that the prime minister had used the podium “to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians”. The absent meeting with the American president is the loudest detail. Watch the Israeli polls next week.