JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced leaders who had recognized a Palestinian state, as he headed to the United States on Thursday for White House talks and an address to the UN General Assembly.
His remarks came three days after France led a special summit on the sidelines of the General Assembly, which saw a slew of Western governments recognise the State of Palestine against the backdrop of the nearly two-year Gaza war.
Netanyahu is due to address the assembly on Friday.
“At the General Assembly, I will speak our truth — the truth of the citizens of Israel, the truth of the (Israeli) soldiers, the truth of our nation,” Netanyahu said at Ben Gurion airport ahead of his departure, according to a statement from his office.
“I will condemn those leaders who, instead of condemning the murderers, rapists and burners of children, want to give them a state in the heart of Israel. This will not happen.”
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas will address the United Nations virtually today, Manila time, as the United States, despite its opposition to him, weighs whether to try to stop Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
The veteran 89-year-old Palestinian Authority president will address the UN General Assembly three days after France led a special summit in which a slew of Western nations recognized a state of Palestine.
US President Donald Trump’s administration adamantly rejected statehood and, in a highly unusual step, barred Abbas and his senior aides from traveling to New York for the annual gathering of world leaders.
The General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to let Abbas address the world body with a video message.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to allow a Palestinian state and far-right members of his cabinet have threatened to annex the West Bank in a bid to kill any prospect of true independence.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu said the recent flurry of recognitions of Palestinian statehood, including by Britain and France, did “not obligate Israel in any way,” calling it a “shameful capitulation of some leaders to Palestinian terror.”
On Thursday, he said he would meet with US President Trump for a fourth time in Washington.
“I will discuss with him the great opportunities that our victories have brought, as well as our need to complete the goals of the war: to bring back all our hostages, to defeat Hamas and to expand the circle of peace that has opened up to us,” Netanyahu said.
US envoy Steve Witkoff said Wednesday he expected a breakthrough related to Gaza in the coming days, saying Trump had presented a plan to Arab and Islamic countries.
“We presented what we call the Trump 21-point plan for peace in the Mideast and Gaza,” Witkoff said.
“I think it addresses Israeli concerns as well as the concerns of all the neighbours in the region,” he said on the sidelines of the General Assembly, without elaborating on the 21 points.
“We’re hopeful, and I might say even confident, that in the coming days we’ll be able to announce some sort of breakthrough.”
An Israeli air strike on a home where displaced people had taken refuge in central Gaza killed at least 11 people on Thursday, the territory’s civil defense spokesperson told AFP.
In recent weeks the military has been carrying out a ground assault on Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban center, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee.
A White House official told AFP that Trump wants to bring the conflict “to an expeditious close” and that foreign partners from the meeting “expressed the hope that they could work together with Special Envoy Witkoff to consider the President’s plan.”
Macron said that the US proposal incorporates core elements of a French plan including disarmament of Hamas and the dispatch of an international stabilization force.
A French position paper seen by AFP calls for the gradual transfer of security control in Gaza to a reformed Palestinian Authority once a ceasefire is in place.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, one of the leaders who met jointly with Trump, said that the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country was willing to offer at least 20,000 troops.
Abbas’s Palestinian Authority enjoys limited control over parts of the West Bank under agreements reached through the Oslo peace accords that started in 1993.
Abbas’s Fatah is the rival of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, although Netanyahu’s government has sought to conflate the two.
