Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran on Friday that Israel would attack if attacked first and warned that his country could reach any part of the cleric-run state as he vowed to fight in Gaza.
“I have a message for the tyrants in Tehran. If you attack us, we will attack you,” Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly.
“There is no place in Iran that Israel’s long arms cannot reach, and that is true of the entire Middle East.”
When Netanyahu took the stage to deliver his address amid cheers and angry chanting, representatives from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories walked out of the room.
“When I heard the lies and slander leveled against my country by many of the speakers on this stage, I decided to come here and set matters straight,” Netanyahu said at the beginning of his speech.
Before his speech, protesters gathered outside Netanyahu’s hotel in New York to demand an end to violence in Gaza and Lebanon.
‘The deadliest period’
On Wednesday, the United States, France and other allies unveiled a 21-day ceasefire proposal after President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The White House has said the call for a ceasefire was “coordinated” with Israel, but Netanyahu’s office said Thursday that the prime minister has not responded to the proposal.
“This is an American-French proposal, to which the prime minister has not even responded,” a statement from Netanyahu’s office said. It said he ordered the army “to continue the fight with full force.”
Deadly cross-border shootings have taken place between Hezbollah and Israel since Hamas, the Palestinian affiliate of the Iran-backed group, attacked Israel on October 7.
Netanyahu vowed on Friday that “Hamas must go” and that it would have no role in rebuilding Gaza as he vowed to fight until “complete victory”.
Since Monday, Israel has shifted its focus from Gaza to its northern front with Lebanon, where heavy bombardment has killed 700 people and displaced some 118,000.
Netanyahu said that Israel will continue to attack Lebanon until we achieve our objectives.
The United Nations said on Friday that the “devastating” intensity of Israeli strikes targeting Hezbollah militants is causing Lebanon to face its “deadliest period in a generation”.
The Israeli attacks bring the total number of people killed in the nearly year-long conflict in Lebanon to more than 1,500, according to Lebanese officials.
This number exceeds the 1,200 mostly civilians killed during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Israel also killed about 160 people, most of them soldiers.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
