Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu landed Sunday evening at JFK International Airport in New York, in advance of his address to the United Nations General Assembly, set for Monday.
Netanyahu is scheduled to speak three days after Israel was accused in a speech at the same podium of carrying out a “genocidal crime” in Gaza by Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
The PLO chairman, who also heads the Palestinian Authority unity government and Fatah faction, began his own speech by proclaiming that Israel had chosen to make this year “a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.”
This was presumably a reference to the 50-day counter terror Operation Protective Edge that Israel was forced to carry out in order to silence the endless rocket and missile attacks on southern Israel by Gaza’s ruling Hamas terrorist organization.
Abbas went on to bemoan the “Palestine’s beloved martyred children, women and men” and rage against “the colonial occupying Power” that he said was responsible for “a new Nakba.” It was the “racist occupying State” which he said had committed a larger “genocidal crime” in Gaza, displacing “half a million people” from their homes.
He failed to mention that it was the Gazans themselves who were responsible for the deaths — Hamas members who insisted on launching attacks on Israelis from within civilian enclaves, using their relatives and neighbors as human shields and teaching children how to launch rockets too.
Israeli satellite imagery captured shots of the sites from where the rockets and missiles were being launched, and detailed maps have been documented for media and legal experts in the international arena.
“I will tell the truth on behalf of Israel’s citizens to the entire world,” the prime minister said in a statement late Saturday.
“In my UN General Assembly speech and in all of my meetings I will represent the citizens of Israel and will, on their behalf, refute the slander and lies directed at our country.”
Netanyahu is expected to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday.
