(Prime Minister's Office) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly on Sep. 27, 2024: Here's the truth: Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again. Yet we face savage enemies who seek our annihilation, and we must defend ourselves against them. These savage murderers, our enemies, seek not only to destroy us, but they seek to destroy our common civilization and return all of us to a dark age of tyranny and terror. The choice we face today is the curse of Iran's unremitting aggression or the blessing of a historic reconciliation between Arab and Jew. Israel has already made its choice. We're building a partnership for peace with our Arab neighbors while fighting the forces of terror that threaten that peace. I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran: If you strike us, we will strike you. There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that's true of the entire Middle East. Iran's aggression, if it's not checked, will endanger every single country in the Middle East, and many, many countries in the rest of the world, because Iran seeks to impose its radicalism well beyond the Middle East. That's why it funds terror networks on five continents. That's why it builds ballistic missiles for nuclear warheads to threaten the entire world. I call on the Security Council to snap back UN Security Council sanctions against Iran because we must all do everything in our power to ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons. The war in Gaza can come to an end now. All that has to happen is for Hamas to surrender, lay down its arms, and release all the hostages. But if they don't, we will fight until we achieve victory. Total victory. There is no substitute for it. Israel must also defeat Hizbullah in Lebanon. It has murdered more Americans and more Frenchmen than any group except Bin Laden. And it has attacked Israel viciously over the last 20 years. In the last year, completely unprovoked, a day after the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, Hizbullah began attacks against Israel, which forced more than 60,000 Israelis on our northern border to leave their homes, becoming refugees in their own land. Just imagine if terrorists turned El Paso and San Diego into ghost towns. How long would the American government tolerate that? I doubt they would tolerate it even for a single day. Yet Israel has been tolerating this intolerable situation for nearly a year. Well, I've come here today to say enough is enough. We will not accept a terror army perched on our northern border, able to perpetrate another Oct. 7-style massacre. For 18 years, Hizbullah brazenly refused to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which requires it to move its forces away from our borders. Israel has no choice, and has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their homes safely, and that's exactly what we're doing. We'll continue degrading Hizbullah until all our objectives are met.
2024-09-29 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive