Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani uttered these words last month while calling on the federal government to arrest war criminal Netanyahu and force him to face trial for the ICC warrant issued against him for war crimes. Unfortunately, the Trump regime has refused to comply. Meanwhile, corporate media continues to frame war criminal Netanyahu’s visit without the correct framing—that of a head of state credibly accused of war crimes and genocide. Therefore, as part of our commitment to human rights at Let’s Address This, we are analyzing and debunking several of the most egregious lies spewed by war criminal Netanyahu against the citizens of the world. Failure to hold war criminals accountable results in only one thing—more war crimes. And as governments and legacy media outlets are failing in this responsibility, we will not. Because Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, and we will not remain silent.
Let’s Address This.
The following is a transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address during the 81st U.N. General Assembly in New York City, on Sept. 24, released by the prime minister’s office. Full text available here.
Lie 1: Israel Prevented Iran From Procuring a Nuclear Weapon
As war criminal Netanyahu began his speech, nearly 100 delegates walked out, refusing to listen to the words of a war criminal. This clearly struck a nerve and war criminal Netanyahu lashed out in desperation.
Mr. President, Before I begin, just a quick announcement: If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall—please do so now.
He continued.
Fourteen years ago, I stood on this podium, and I drew a red line. I vowed to prevent Iran’s murderous dictatorship from developing atomic bombs, nuclear weapons aimed at destroying Israel, nuclear weapons that could threaten the entire world. That’s exactly what we did. Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do. But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.
This is false. Not only has war criminal Netanyahu falsely claimed since the 1990s that Iran was on the ‘cusp’ of procuring nuclear weapons, but war criminal Netanyahu has never once offered any evidence validating that claim. Moreover, it was the Iran Nuclear Deal peacefully brokered by President Obama, and fully adhered to by the Iranian government (as confirmed by independent investigators), that ultimately prevented Iran from procuring a nuclear weapon.
In illegally bombing Iran, killing 165 innocent schoolgirls, and nearly 2000 Iranian civilians (at least), war criminal Netanyahu has only committed more war crimes.
Lie 2: Israel Defended Other Countries From Attack
War criminal Netanyahu continues:
In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall! In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.
This is false. First, no one has “privately thanked” war criminal Netanyahu and he’s provided no evidence of such. This lie is right out of Trump’s playbook. As far as “defending” countries, on the contrary, it is well documented that Israel has attacked more countries than any other country on Earth:
Israel has attacked more countries than any other country this year. In 2025, Israel attacked at least six countries, including Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen. It also carried out strikes in Tunisian, Maltese and Greek territorial waters on aid flotillas heading for Gaza. According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), an independent conflict monitor, from January 1 to December 5, Israel carried out at least 10,631 attacks, marking one of the broadest geographic military offensives in a single year.
War criminal Netanyahu then continued his propaganda speech by discussing his late brother, after which he turned to October 7, 2023, which he called, “the darkest day in Israel’s history.”
Lie 3: Ongoing Propaganda About 10/7 and His War Crimes
War criminal Netanyahu continued:
These Hamas monsters, they slaughtered Holocaust survivors. They burned babies alive in front of their parents. They beheaded our men. They brutally raped our women, and then they murdered them.
As is well documented, war criminal Netanyahu knew of the 10/7 attack ahead of time and refused to act. On the day of the attack, he waited 3-4 hours before he deployed the military. Prior to the attack, war criminal Netanyahu funded Hamas with suitcases full of cash. The “burned babies” propaganda was debunked almost immediately after it was made, yet war criminal Netanyahu continues to spew it. And Israel’s own prosecutor Moran Gaz admits they have no evidence that women suffered rape on 10/7—and to be sure these are not my words—but the words of the Israeli prosecutor responsible for prosecuting the crime of rape. On the contrary, the Israeli government blocked independent UN investigators out of fear that they’ll conclude that the Israeli military is committing rape. And indeed now the UN has placed Israel on the sexual violence blacklist due to its repeated raping of Palestinian prisoners.
Of course, war criminal Netanyahu neglects to mention that his military is on the UN sexual violence blacklist for repeated rape:
The UN verified sexual abuse of 31 Palestinian men, women and children from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank between 2023 and 2025. Israeli attacks included repeated gang-rapes and the use of sexual violence as a form of torture, the report said.
Any objective seeker of truth can see that literally every word that spewed from war criminal Netanyahu’s mouth is a lie, a distraction, and disinformation—all to prevent accountability for the war crimes and genocide he has committed. War criminal Netanyahu calls 10/7 “Israel’s darkest day,” and hopes the world ignores the fact that no single person is more responsible for allowing 10/7 to happen than is war criminal Netanyahu.
Not content, war criminal Netanyahu continued by bragging about more of his war crimes. He declared:
Remember the beepers? Well, I can tell you this: Hezbollah certainly remembers them.
War criminal Netanyahu is referring to Israel’s covert exploding beeper attack, which wounded at least 3000 mostly civilians, and killed at least two innocent children. This is his idea of “justice.”
Lie 4: Whitewashing Israeli Colonizers in the West Bank
Next, war criminal Netanyahu tried to sanitize Israeli colonizer terrorism in the West Bank, stating:
What [the press] cover is a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who chop down olive trees. Occasionally, they light some fires. I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism. We’re a country of law. So we put our Shin Bet on them. But that’s what they call settler violence. And the number of casualties a year? Maybe two or three. In the total time this has been discussed, maybe two or three dead.
War criminal Netanyahu shamelessly claims “maybe two or three dead.” By September 2023, mere weeks before the 10/7 attack, Israeli colonizers and military had killed 247 Palestinians in the West Bank, including nearly 50 children. The headlines read, “2023 Marks Deadliest Year On Record for Children in the Occupied West Bank.”
Not only does war criminal Netanyahu whitewash their brutal murders, he has refused to hold accountable the Israeli colonizers committing these murders, or explain how “a country of law” allows colonizers to build illegal settlements on Palestinian land, backed by a nuclear armed military?
And of course, not a word of the 20,000 children that war criminal Netanyahu has murdered in Gaza since 10/7. Even since the so-called “ceasefire” that Hamas has fully adhered to, the Israeli military has murdered more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza. And yet, zero acknowledgement from war criminal Netanyahu.
Lie 5: Ignoring His Own War Crimes
In continuing to project his own war crimes, war criminal Netanyahu added:
You’re sitting here, in the General Assembly Hall of the U.N. Do you know what one ton, just one, one-ton ballistic missile would do if it hit this place? It would obliterate the entire compound. In fact, two such missiles would obliterate the U.N. So you can imagine, think about one thousand gigantic missiles falling from the skies on your cities, on your homes.
While war criminal Netanyahu speaks of nonsensical hypotheticals, the New York Times documented that on at least 200 different occasions, the Israeli military forced Palestinian civilians into a “safe zone” and then dropped two thousand-pound bombs on them. Another study by the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University confirmed the same, and even worse:
A new study reveals that between October 7 and November 17, 2023, the Israeli military air-dropped nearly 600 highly destructive 2000 lb bombs with the capacity to damage hospital infrastructure and kill or cause severe injury hundreds of meters away. One-third of the bombs identified were within dangerous proximity of hospitals across the Gaza Strip.
“This study supports emerging evidence that the Israeli military has disregarded the protection of hospitals, mandated by international humanitarian law, through the systematic pattern of dropping massive M-84 bombs close enough to hospitals to knowingly cause significant damage, injury, and death. The damage to hospitals due to these and other munitions will have immediate and long-term effects on the health of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” said Yara M. Asi, PhD, Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, Visiting Scientist at the FXB Center, and one of the authors of the study.
War criminal Netanyahu refuses to discuss any of these facts, because doing so would further indict him.
Lie 6: The “War for Truth”
Next, war criminal Netanyahu spewed propaganda claiming he’s the victim of yet another war, “the war for truth.” War criminal Netanyahu declared:
But there is an eighth front to this war. It’s the war for truth. It is waged in the world’s media, and most perniciously, in social media. Several foreign countries have spent untold billions to spread lies about my country.
Once again, this is projection. It is well documented that the Israeli government is spending seemingly unlimited amounts of money to pay influencers up to $7000 per post to sanitize Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and spread hatred of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, or of anyone calling for justice for Palestine. So blatant is war criminal Netanyahu’s propaganda that even the Trump Department of Justice is demanding to know who the Israeli government is paying so they can be required to follow the law and register as foreign agents.
Lie 7: Hamas and Human Shields, Hospitals as Command Posts, Stolen Food
As his propaganda speech came to a close, war criminal Netanyahu resorted to the most common propaganda he’s spewed over the last three years:
It will take time for the world to acknowledge what is so plain to see. That Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields. That it used hospitals, schools and mosques as terrorist command posts. That it stole much of the food we let into Gaza.
None of this is true, and in fact it is well documented that the opposite is true.
The UK Guardian reports:
Israeli soldiers are using Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza to enter and clear tunnels and buildings they suspect may have been booby-trapped. The practice was so widespread across different units fighting in Gaza that it could in effect be considered a “protocol”, said Nadav Weiman, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, a group founded by Israeli combat veterans to document military abuses. “We heard it from different units, fighting in different times and different places inside Gaza,” Weiman said. “Then we understood it’s something a lot more widespread – or even, I could say, a protocol – in the IDF.”
These are Israeli soldiers admitting that using Palestinians as human shields is not isolated, but “protocol.” And likewise, consider the Israeli military’s dehumanizing ‘justification’ to use Palestinians as human shields:
One soldier had been told Palestinian civilians were being used to replace the dog units that search for explosives ‘because too many dogs had died’, he added.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time during this siege on Gaza that Palestinians have documented the Israeli military using them as human shields. In June a video emerged of a Palestinian strapped to the hood of an Israeli military vehicle.
Indeed, far from being an isolated incident, Israel’s use of Palestinians as human shields goes back decades without consequence. So prevalent was this barbaric practice that way back in 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court was forced to issue a formal ban on the Israeli military using Palestinians as human shields. As The Guardian confirmed way back then:
The Israeli high court yesterday ruled that the army’s long-standing practice of using Palestinian civilians as human shields in combat is illegal under international law. It said the military’s claim to have amended the procedure to allow civilians to “volunteer” to work with the army was still unacceptable because it was unlikely anyone would freely do so.
And despite this ruling, now more than two decades later, Israeli soldiers once again admit that the use of Palestinians as human shields is “protocol.” Likewise, as the UN has well documented, there is no evidence that Hamas used hospitals as “command centers” and the Israeli military provided zero evidence of such.
Finally, far from Hamas “stealing food,” the actual evidence as documented by even Israeli human rights orgs is that the Israeli colonizers are blocking and stealing food for Gazans suffering genocide. It is truly incredible how every single accusation made by war criminal Netanyahu is actually a confession of his own war crimes.
Lie 8: Falsely Attributing Antisemitism to Mayor Zohran Mamdani
Continuing his projection, war criminal Netanyahu next accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “antisemitism.”
So to all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you. Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York.
First, war criminal Netanyahu’s attacks on Mayor Mamdani are for a very simple reason—insecurity. War criminal Netanyahu knows that Mayor Mamdani is beloved—yes, including by Jewish people as well. Jewish Americans trust Mayor Mamdani over war criminal Bibi. A July 2026 AP-NORC poll of 1,022 Jewish Americans found that:
- 44% of Jews view Mamdani favorably and 39% unfavorably
- 32% of Jews view Netanyahu favorably and 59% unfavorably
In other words, amongst Jewish Americans, Zohran Mamdani has an approval that is 30 points higher than does war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. Why? Because Zohran Mamdani is a man of integrity and Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. Moreover, the “brave soldiers” that war criminal Netanyahu defends have committed genocide, as affirmed by B’TSalem, an Israeli human rights organization, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Amnesty International, and 85% of genocide scholars globally. But not a word of this from war criminal Netanyahu. He expects us to believe Israeli orgs, Israeli scholars, and Israeli Jews living in Israel are all “antisemitic.” Nonsense.
Lie 9: Israel Protects Christians
In his final appeal to right-wing Christian nationalists in the United States, war criminal Netanyahu claims that it is only because of Israel that Christians are safe in the Middle East. He spewed:
Did you speak out, for that matter, for Christians persecuted in Iran and throughout the Middle East? On Christians, you know that their numbers are plummeting everywhere in the Middle East where they’re being persecuted and hounded, except one place: my country, Israel, where the Christian community is growing, thriving, succeeding.
For the record, yes, all of us condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza have also unhesitatingly condemned the persecution of Christians in Iran. We’ve also stood in opposition to war criminal Netanyahu’s illegal regime change war that has killed 2000 Iranian civilians. That does not mean we support the current Iranian regime. But speaking of Christians in the Middle East, you won’t hear war criminal Netanyahu discuss is how his military bombed churches in Gaza, killing Palestinian Christians who were close with the late Pope, even as they sought safety inside their church.
What you won’t hear war criminal Netanyahu discuss is how his military bombed and killed Christians in Lebanon, threatening to further bomb them if they committed the ‘crime’ of hiding the Muslims he was also trying to kill. That same bombing destroyed ancient Christian heritage sites in Lebanon. As Vatican News reports:
In Lebanon last Friday, a convent and a former school belonging to the Salvatorian Sisters were destroyed by the Israeli army. This is not an isolated case. In 2024, Melkite churches in Yaroun and Derdghaya, which are listed as Lebanese cultural heritage sites, were been destroyed.. Caught in the crossfire between Hezbollah and the Israeli army, some Christian villages have also been razed and emptied of their inhabitants, including Qawzah and Alma el Chaab. Many Lebanese say this is an attempt to make sure that civilians can never return.
What you won’t hear war criminal Netanyahu discuss is how Israeli extremists spit on Christians in Israel and view them as second class citizens. For example the US State Department reports:
Christian clergy and pilgrims continued to report instances of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem harassing or spitting on them. In one incident in June, a Catholic friar reported being assaulted in public by three men wearing kippot (yarmulkes) who spit at and verbally attacked him.
And just last month, the Wall Street Journal (by no means a liberal outlet) reported on the “Rise of Anti Christian Hate in Israel.”
JERUSALEM—In Jerusalem’s Old City, a group of Israeli teenagers recently banged on the door of the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church and asked if there were Christians inside it. They wanted to spit at them. The boys said it was a religious duty, or mitzvah, to humiliate Christians, or, as they called them, idol worshipers. “We are supposed to hate them,” explained one teen, wrapped in an Israeli flag.
This is the state of Christians under war criminal Netanyahu’s “leadership.” Rather than so much as acknowledge the systemic hatred, violence, and genocide that war criminal Netanyahu is creating and perpetuating against Christians in the Middle East, he would rather project his own injustices on others.
Conclusion
I did not address every lie—just most of the largest ones. The volume is just too many. That volume is itself part of the strategy: flood the zone, exhaust the fact-checkers, and hope that the sheer scale of the propaganda prevents any single lie from being held to account. Not on our watch.
I’ve addressed the most dangerous lies. The most revealing of a man who knows exactly what he has done—commit genocide—and is doing everything possible to escape accountability. This man does not deserve a podium at the United Nations General Assembly. He deserves a seat in a courtroom at The Hague.
But until that day comes. Until the day the international community summons the moral courage to enforce its own laws against the powerful—as it enforces them against the powerless. Unil then, the work of accountability falls to those of us who refuse to be silent.
That is why Let’s Address This exists.
Not to cozy up to power, or to give war criminals favorable framing. But to do the work that heads of state and legacy media have abdicated—naming what is happening, documenting who is responsible, and refusing to normalize any of it. This work is only possible because of you. If you have read this far—if you believe that holding war criminals accountable matters—then I am asking you directly: become a paid subscriber to Let’s Address This today and help us continue to elevate our platform and work to uphold human rights.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He will not face accountability because a government decided to act. But because enough people refused to stay silent on these human rights injustices, until the pressure became impossible to ignore.
It is critical to our global safety that every one of us becomes one of those people—the ones who become impossible to ignore in our calls for absolute justice and human rights. Let us embrace the duty for justice.
Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This—a platform dedicated to human rights, international accountability, and the journalism that corporate media refuses to deliver. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.
As an alternative to a monthly subscription, you can also make a one-time contribution to support our human rights platform at any amount that fits your budget.
Thank you, Qasim, for educating us about this.
Thank you Qasim for pointing all this out to us and telling the truth. (Do you ever sleep?) Take care!