Prime Minister Netanyahu's Speech at the U.N. General Assembly

"...Thanks to the resolve of our people, the courage of our soldiers, and the bold decisions we took, Israel rebounded from its darkest day to deliver one of the most stunning military comebacks in history.

But we’re not done yet. The final remnants of Hamas are holed up in Gaza City. They vow to repeat the atrocities of October 7th again and again and again, no matter how diminished their forces. That is why Israel must finish the job, and that is why we want to do so as fast as possible.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Much of the world no longer remembers October 7th. But we remember, Israel remembers October 7th. On that day… I’ll tell you, you can remember October 7th too. You see this large pin here? It’s a QR code. What I ask you to do is hold up your phones, zoom in, and you too will see why we fight, and why we must win. It’s all in here.

On October 7th, Hamas carried out the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. They slaughtered 1,200 innocent people, including over 40 Americans, and foreign nationals from dozens of countries represented here.

They beheaded men. They raped women. They burned babies, alive. They burned babies alive in front of their parents. What monsters.

These monsters took more than 250 people hostage. Those included Holocaust survivors, grandmothers, grandmothers and their grandchildren. Who takes hostage grandmothers and grandchildren? Hamas does...

For much of the past two years, Israel has had to fight a seven-front war against barbarism with many of your nations opposing us. Astoundingly, as we fight the terrorists who murdered many of your citizens, you are fighting us. You condemn us. You embargo us. And you wage political and legal warfare, it’s called lawfare, against us.

I say to the representatives of those nations: This is not an indictment of Israel. It’s an indictment of you!

It’s an indictment of weak-kneed leaders who appease evil, rather than support a nation whose brave soldiers guard you from the barbarians at the gate — they’re already penetrating the gate.

When will you learn? You can’t appease your way out of Jihad, and you won’t escape the Islamist storm by sacrificing Israel. To overcome that storm, you have to stand with Israel. But that’s not what you’re doing.

As the prophets of Israel foretold in the Bible, you’ve turned good into evil … and evil into good. I want to drill down on this. Take the false charge of genocide. Israel is accused of deliberately targeting civilians.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the opposite is true. The head of urban warfare studies, Col. John Spencer, he’s perhaps the world’s greatest expert on urban warfare, and he says: “Israel is applying more measures to minimize civilian casualties than any military in history.”

And because we’re doing that, the ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties is less than 2 to 1 in Gaza. That’s an astoundingly low ratio, lower than NATO’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially when you consider that Gaza is one of the most densely populated urban areas on earth.

It has hundreds of miles of terror tunnels underground, and it has countless terror towers above ground, and thousands of terrorists embedded in these tunnels and in these towers in civilian areas.

If you want to see what measures Israel takes to avoid civilian casualties in this war, just look at what we’re doing now in Gaza City, the last Hamas stronghold, one of the two last strongholds. For three weeks, Israel dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages and made countless phone calls urging civilians to leave Gaza city before our military moves in. At the same time, Hamas implants itself in mosques, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and tries to force these civilians not to leave, to stay in harm’s way. It often threatens them at gunpoint if they try to do so. For Israel, every civilian casualty is a tragedy; for Hamas, it’s a strategy.

Hamas uses civilians as human shields and as props in its sick propaganda war against Israel. A propaganda war that the western media buys hook, line and sinker.

Despite Hamas’s threats, close to 700,000 Gazans, almost three quarters of a million, have already heeded our calls and moved to safe zones. Now, I want to ask you a simple question. A simple logical question. Would a country committing genocide plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting, to get out of harm’s way? Would we tell them get out if we’re trying to commit genocide? We’re trying to get them out. And Hamas is trying to keep them in.

This charge is so baseless, the comparison to genocide, wholesale slaughter of populations. Did the Nazis ask the Jews to leave, kindly leave, go out? Did others? Do you want me to name all the genocidal leaders of history. Just go one by one. Did anyone do this? Did they say “get out so we can come in”? Of course not. The truth has been turned on its head.

Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization whose charter calls for the murder of all Jews on the planet, this genocidal organization is given a pass. It’s barely mentioned. While Israel, which does everything it can to get civilians out of harm’s way — Israel is put in the dock. What a joke!

Want to hear another one? Israel is accused of deliberately starving the people of Gaza, when Israel is deliberately feeding the people of Gaza. Since the beginning of the war, Israel has let into Gaza more than 2,000,000 tons of food and aid. That’s one ton of aid for every man, woman and child in Gaza; nearly 3,000 calories per person, per day. Some starvation policy!

If there are Gazans who don’t have enough food, it’s because Hamas is stealing it. Hamas steals it, hoards it and sells it at exorbitant prices to fund its war machine. Last month, even the UN, not exactly a supporter of Israel. You’re supposed to laugh, by the way. Last month, even the UN admitted that Hamas and other armed groups looted 85% of the trucks. That’s why you have deprivation. Those who peddle the blood libels of genocide and starvation against Israel are no better than those who peddled blood libels against the Jews in the Middle Ages, when they falsely accused us of poisoning wells, spreading plague and using the blood of children to bake Passover Matzas...

On October 7th, the enemies of Israel tried to extinguish that light. Two years later, the resolve of Israel, and the strength of Israel burn brighter than ever. With God’s help, that strength and that resolve will lead us to a speedy victory and to a brilliant future of prosperity and peace."