Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s U.N. address was "saturated with lies and falsifications,” a senior Palestinian foreign ministry official said Friday, calling it the speech of a "defeated man” relying on fear to defend a "genocidal state.”
"It was the speech of a defeated man, a desperate leader who once again tried to rally a West that has increasingly distanced itself from a genocidal state, using fear as his only argument," the director of the Palestinian Foreign Ministry's European affairs department, Adel Atieh, told AFP.
"This speech showed neither vision nor perspective: it only reflected growing isolation, a headlong rush forward and the anxiety of a power that knows it stands on the wrong side of history," he added.
Encircled by critics and protesters at the United Nations, Netanyahu told fellow world leaders on Friday that his nation "must finish the job" in Gaza, giving a defiant speech despite growing international isolation over his refusal to end the genocidal war.
"Western leaders may have buckled under the pressure," he said. "And I guarantee you one thing: Israel won't."
Netanyahu's speech, aimed as much at his increasingly divided domestic audience as the global one, began after dozens of delegates from multiple nations walked out of the U.N. General Assembly hall en masse to protest Israel's genocidal attacks, which killed at least 65,000 Palestinians, destroyed the blockaded Palestinian enclave and pushed it into famine.