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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the recent formal recognition of a Palestinian state by several Western nations “shameful” during his speech to the United Nation’s 80th General Assembly on Friday. But Netanyahu was addressing an almost-empty auditorium after many delegates walked out en masse in protest.
Outside, a crowd of roughly 2,000 protesters, according to police estimates, marched from Times Square to U.N. headquarters, where they chanted slogans and cheered news of the delegates’ walkout, The New York Times reported.
In his speech — which was broadcast in the Israel-Gaza border via loudspeakers, according to BBC reports — Netanyahu denied allegations his government is carrying out a genocide. “The opposite is true,” he said, adding that Israel has dropped “millions of leaflets and sent millions of texts” to inform civilians they needed to evacuate Gaza City.
“Did the Nazis ask the Jews to leave? Kindly leave?” Netanyahu asked, contrasting Israel’s military operations with the Holocaust.
Netanyahu’s presence at the General Assembly presented an awkward situation for other world leaders, as the U.N.-backed International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against him for alleged war crimes in Gaza. The U.N.’s International Court of Justice, meanwhile, is weighing a case, brought by South Africa in December 2023, that alleges Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide under international law.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 65,000 people, many of them children, have been killed in Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which was launched in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in 2023. A U.N. commission of inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars both issued statements in September that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
The evening before Netanyahu’s speech, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith, announced that the company had terminated the Israeli military’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI products, following an August investigation by The Guardian that revealed Israel was using the company’s technology to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. “We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” Smith said. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades.”
Palestine has now been recognized as a sovereign state by more than 150 U.N. member states. The United States, one of Israel’s key Western allies, has not done so.