Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, delivered a genocidal tirade at the United Nations General Assembly Thursday, calling the victims of Israel’s rampage throughout the Middle East “barbarians,” “monsters,” “butchers” and “the worst mass murderers on earth.”
Netanyahu praised the murder of civilians and political leaders in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Reading a roll call of the dead, “Khamenei, Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh, Nasrallah and thousands of other terrorists,” he declared: “They’re all gone too.”
He praised the series of Israeli terrorist attacks on Lebanon in September 2024, in which Israel detonated pagers and walkie-talkies, killing at least 37 and wounding more than 2,931 in Lebanon and Syria, Amnesty International reported on September 20, 2024. “You remember the beepers?” he asked, holding up a pager. “Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”
The tirade by Netanyahu followed the warmongering rant by US President Donald Trump on Tuesday, in which the US president threatened to “annihilate” Iran, and the speech Wednesday by the US-NATO proxy Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who defended NATO-funded Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. “Russia’s revenues must remain a target,” Zelensky declared.
“Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century,” Netanyahu said. “Is this genocide? Of course not. It’s the opposite of genocide.”
He dismissed the attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as the work of “a handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number,” who, he said, had killed “maybe two or three” people.
Netanyahu pledged to overthrow the Iranian government, declaring: “This evil regime will fall, and we will all celebrate that day.”
Outside, more than 1,000 people protested the Gaza genocide. Shortly after noon, several hundred people organized by Jewish Voice for Peace sat down on First Avenue at 39th Street, just south of UN headquarters. After the speech, more than 1,000 people marched behind the Palestinian Youth Movement from Bryant Park toward the UN, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported Thursday.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who just three days earlier held a photo op with Trump at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, oversaw mass arrests.
A New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson said Thursday that police had arrested more than 100 people at the First Avenue sit-in. The arrests began about an hour before Netanyahu spoke. Officers zip-tied the protesters’ hands behind their backs and loaded them onto police buses. Among those arrested were Council Members Chi Ossé, Alexa Avilés and Jennifer Gutiérrez; Assemblymember Emily Gallagher; the actors Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th Congressional District.
Mamdani retained Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whom his predecessor, Eric Adams, had appointed in 2024. On September 17, at a briefing with Tisch, the mayor announced the week’s security operation himself: “City Hall and the NYPD have been working closely with our federal partners for the past few months to prepare for this event . . .” Politico reported Thursday that officers of the Strategic Response Group, the NYPD’s protest-control unit, were seen making arrests. As a candidate, Mamdani had vowed to disband the unit, but Politico noted that “as mayor, he has backed off that pledge.”
Mamdani had said he did not “have any plans to attend any protest.” He told reporters on September 16: “To New Yorkers, I have never encouraged them to protest ... What I have always told them is that they have the right to do so in this city.”
In a December 2024 interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan of the news site Zeteo, Mamdani, then a candidate, said: “As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.”
In a video posted on July 21, he declared: “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government however does and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.” The day before, Trump had written that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.” On August 18, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on the ICC’s president, Judge Tomoko Akane.
The arrests of protesters drew angry responses online. Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of the Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime, wrote on X Thursday afternoon, in a post viewed more than 850,000 times, that Mamdani had campaigned on arresting Netanyahu, but that when Netanyahu came to New York he was given heavy police protection while the NYPD arrested the people protesting against him. Other users accused the mayor of betraying his campaign promise and the anti-genocide movement.
In his speech, Netanyahu denounced Mamdani. Of those who accuse Israel of genocide, he said: “Whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the anti-Semitic mayor of New York, I say this: Shame on you.”
“Mr. Mamdani, you try to stop me from coming here,” he said. “You try to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me.” He accused “Mr. Mamdani’s Hamas buddies” of wanting to kill “every last one of us.”
After the speech, Mamdani issued a written statement: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians. Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The statement did not mention the more than 100 people his police department had arrested that afternoon.
The ICC issued its warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest on November 21, 2024. Its judges found “reasonable grounds to believe” he was responsible for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Israel has killed 73,928 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 175,030 since October 2023, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported Thursday. Israeli forces killed 1,408 of these after the ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025.
On September 16, 2025, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. It named Netanyahu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as having incited that crime.