Netanyahu tells UN Erdogan ‘illegally occupies northern Cyprus’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “illegally occupies northern Cyprus” in his address to the United Nations general assembly. “The latest country to become a super-spreader of antisemitic lies is Turkey. Erdogan is a tyrant. He also hosts the Hamas terror chiefs. He has murdered thousands of Kurdish civilians. He denies the Armenian genocide. He jails journalists and opposition leaders. In fact, I think he holds the world’s record on this. It is a tough call, but I think he’s number one,” he said. He then added that “he illegally occupies northern Cyprus, an EU member, and he regularly transgresses against Greece, a Nato member”, before saying that “now he wants to take over Syria”, and that “that’s not surprising, because he calls for Israel’s destruction almost every single day”. “He says he is going to be the ruler of Jerusalem. No, sir, you wont. This is our country, our city, our capital,” he said. Related Articles • Christodoulides calls out Erdogan’s ‘highest form’ of hypocrisy • Erdogan: Turkish Cypriots’ equal international status must be recognised Away from the Cyprus problem, he described Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023 as “the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust”, and described Hamas as “monsters” who “slaughtered Holocaust survivors”, “burned babies alive in front of their parents”, “beheaded our men”, and “brutally raped our women”. However, he said, Israel “didn’t collapse” in the aftermath of the attacks, but instead “rose and fought like lions”. “For the past three years, our heroic soldiers have fought day in and day out in a seven-front war … Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq, militias in Syria, Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria – they all ganged up on us to wipe us off the face of the earth. They failed,” he said. He said that “we delivered crippling blows to all of them”. ‘Israel hammered Hamas. We pummelled Hezbollah’ “With out great American friends, we crushed Iran’s army, navy, air force, and nuclear facilities. Israel hammered Hamas. We pummelled Hezbollah. You remember the beepers? Remember these things? Well, I can tell you this: Hezbollah certainly remembers them,” he said. The reference to “beepers” comes in reference to an incident in September 2024 in which thousands of handheld pagers in Lebanon and Syria, which had been intended for use by Hezbollah exploded, killing 42 people and injuring as many as 4,000. He went on to say that “the remaining terrorists are desperately trying to regroup”, and that “every day, they try to murder our people, and in particular, they try to murder our people in our historic homeland, Judea”. “By the way, that’s where the word ‘Jew’ comes from: Judea. That’s our land,” he said. Much of the historical territory of Judea now falls into the southern half of the West Bank, which, according to the “1967 borders” as set out in UN security council resolution 242, would fall under Palestinian jurisdiction pursuant to a two-state solution in the region. Netanyahu also said that “there are thousands of attempts per year against peaceful families driving along the roads” in the West Bank, and added that “they shoot at pregnant women” and that “they shoot entire families”. “Of course, none of this is covered in the international press or on social media. What they cover is a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, chop down olive trees, and occasionally set 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,” he said, in reference to Israel’s internal intelligence service. He said that those incidents are “what they call settler violence”, but insisted that this “settler violence” only produces “two or three” casualties per year. “Maybe two or three killed in all the time this has been discussed, compared with the thousands of terrorist attacks against peaceful settlers – honourable, law-abiding people. What a distortion,” he said. ‘We’ve had no greater partner than President Trump’ On this front, he said that “leaders of countries seriously talk about that, and they say it with such importance: ‘we can’t stand settler violence’”, before saying to those leaders, “you don’t know what you’re talking about”. Later in his speech, he said that “in this battle against the barbarians, we’ve had no greater partner than President Trump”, and thanked the United States for embarking on its conflict with Iran earlier this year. “Decades ago, huge understood that if left unchallenged, the fanatical ayatollahs who chant, ‘death to America, death to Israel’ would eventually carry out their mad fantasies, so Israel and America acted together not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilisation,” he said. However, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, like Erdogan, was the subject of criticism, with Netanyahu describing him as the “anti-semitic mayor of New York”, and saying “shame on you, shame on you for distorting the facts, shame on you for inverting victim and aggressor, shame on you for spitting in the face of truth”. “Mr Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York. They talk to me. They tell me, ‘this isn’t the city we remember, it changed so quickly’. No wonder. You praise criminals convicted of supporting Hamas. You count as friends people like Hasan Piker, who said America deserved 9/11. Some friends you have,” he said. Hasan Piker is an American left-wing social media broadcaster. Netanyahu also accused Mamdani of attempting to stop him from attending the general assembly and trying to “silence” him, before adding that “Israel didn’t commit genocide, Israel prevented genocide”. Genocide, he added, is “exactly what Mr Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them”.