The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has shrugged off global appeals for a ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza, using a defiant speech at the UN general assembly to denounce the world body as an “antisemitic swamp” and insist that Israel is “winning” its wars on multiple fronts.
He said Israel would continue “degrading” Hezbollah, effectively rejecting plans for a 21-day ceasefire across the Lebanese border that had been backed by the US and France and drawn up in close collaboration with the Israeli government.
Israel’s air war against Hezbollah has killed 700 people inside Lebanon this week and the military said it was preparing for a possible ground invasion, fuelling fears that the cross-border war could escalate.
An hour after Netanyahu’s speech ended, Israel launched heavy airstrikes on southern Beirut, reportedly targeting the Hezbollah command centre and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. It was unclear if he had been hit or not, but dozens of people were reported wounded in the attack.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said he would fly home immediately.
World leaders gathered in New York for the UN general assembly this week had used their moment in the global spotlight to plead for a halt to the war in Gaza and across the Lebanese border.
Before Israel was given the podium on Friday morning, the Slovenian prime minister, Robert Golob, demanded: “Mr Netanyahu, stop this war now,” and Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, described Israel’s war in Gaza as “the systematic slaughter of innocent people”.
In his address, Netanyahu told a half-empty room – many national delegations walked out in protest as he took the floor – that Israel was committed to military victory in a multi-front war.
“We are winning,” he said, adding that since Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, Israel had shown that “if you strike us, we will strike you”.
“We will continue degrading Hezbollah,” he said, adding that there was no place in the region that “the long arm of Israel cannot reach”.
Netanyahu said the campaign against Hezbollah would continue until Israelis could return to their homes in the north of the country, and that the war in Gaza would stop only when Israel claimed “total victory” or Hamas laid down its arms – neither of which appear probable anytime soon.
“Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again,” he said, but made no mention of ceasefire deals for Gaza and Lebanon that have been championed by the US.
The Biden administration clearly thought it had brokered the outline of an agreement to halt the conflict in Lebanon earlier this week, and was angry about Netanyahu’s last-minute decision to back away from that plan.
Washington is Israel’s most important ally, offering diplomatic protection in the United Nations as a permanent member of the security council and critical weapons for the military, but has struggled to leverage that support into influence over Netanyahu’s political decisions.
The US national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said pointedly that a statement about a 21-day pause “wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed on to it, but Israel itself”.
Instead of talking about a halt to hostilities, Netanyahu described an existential “seven-front” war against Hamas and its allies, from the Houthis in Yemen, to militias in Iraq and Syria, militants in the occupied West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“My country is at war, fighting for its life,” he said, adding that he left Jerusalem reluctantly, to “set the record straight” in New York.
Nearly a year into a war that has reshaped politics in the region, his speech defiantly ignored those profound shifts.
He called for a “historic peace agreement” with Saudi Arabia, something that was on the table a year ago with strong backing from Washington. Now, though, Riyadh has ruled out normalisation without recognition of a Palestinian state, and its delegation did not hear Netanyahu’s proposal because they had left the room.
He also urged global action to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This has been a long-term US preoccupation, but frantic efforts to stave off a full-blown conventional conflict with Iran have forced nuclear concerns far down the diplomatic agenda.
Netanyahu said days of attacks on Israel at the United Nations were a reflection not on his country but on the international body, which he described as a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
He also attacked the international criminal court’s request for arrest warrants for himself and the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as “pure antisemitism”.
He ended with an awkward adaptation of two lines from the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas’ well-known poem about confronting inevitable death, using them to insist that Israel would outlast its enemies.
“To paraphrase a great poet: Israel will not go gentle into that good night, we will never need to rage against the dying of the light, because the torch of Israel will forever shine bright,” Netanyahu said.