Netanyahu defies calls for ceasefire at UN as Israeli missiles target Beirut

Benjamin Netanyahu shrugged off global appeals for a ceasefire in a defiant speech to the United Nations that was delivered barely an hour before massive airstrikes targeting Hezbollah’s leader levelled several apartment blocks in Beirut.

Addressing the general assembly in New York, Israel’s prime minister presented his country as a champion of peace and prosperity for the Middle East, even as its security forces prepared an attack that spread terror in the streets of the Lebanese capital and heightened fears of an all-out regional war.

“Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again,” he said, but made no mention of the ceasefire deals for Gaza and Lebanon that have been championed by the US.

Instead he threatened more attacks in a campaign against Hezbollah that began last week with exploding pagers, and this week expanded to airstrikes that have killed more than 700 people and displaced at least 90,000.

“We will continue degrading Hezbollah,” he told a half-empty hall. Many national delegations had walked out in protest when Netanyahu took the podium.

It was a clear retreat from 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.

Soon after he finished speaking, huge explosions ripped through southern Beirut, reducing six buildings to rubble, reportedly in an attempt to assassinate Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, by taking out an underground bunker.

Netanyahu’s office said he would fly home immediately, breaking a usual rule against travel on the Jewish Sabbath. It released a photo of the prime minister ordering the strike, apparently from a landline in a makeshift command centre in New York.

World leaders gathered in New York for the UN general assembly this week repeatedly 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 attacks in Gaza as “the systematic slaughter of innocent people”.

Netanyahu responded by denouncing the UN as an “antisemitic swamp”, and insisted that Israel was committed to military victory. “We are winning,” he said, adding that since the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, Israel had shown that “if you strike us, we will strike you”.

Netanyahu said the campaign against Hezbollah would continue until Israelis could return to their homes in the north of the country, and the war in Gaza would stop only when Israel claimed “total victory” or Hamas laid down its arms.

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 UN 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.”

Related: Israel says heavy air attack on Beirut targeted Hezbollah HQ

Netanyahu said Israel was fighting 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 had 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 the 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 down the diplomatic agenda.

He ended with an awkward adaptation of two lines from the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas’ poem about confronting mortality, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, 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.