UN theatrics at odds with on ground reality: Israel threatened with sanctions
When Netanyahu on Sept. 23 flew to the US for the eighth time during Trump’s second term, the two leaders did not have a personal get together. Instead, they transformed the UN General Assembly into a stage for their propaganda and electioneering theatrics.
The US president only mentioned Israel once and Netanyahu not at all in his Sept. 23 ‘fake news’-strewn accolade to his own personal leadership and US strength. The following day, after 77 delegations from the Global South walked out of the hall as he took the podium, Netanyahu delivered a lie-studded campaign speech in which he celebrated the heroism of “the most moral army in the world, the IDF” which has for three years “been valiantly fighting a seven-front war.” Holding up a beeper to remind the audience of Israel’s mass pager attack on Hezbollah, he declared that Israel and America “acted together not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilization.”
Unusually, Netanyahu only praised Trump once, stating that he “boldly confronted an enormous danger to America, Israel and the world.” After denouncing all the international attention paid to “settler violence” which he maintained was the work of “a handful of juvenile delinquents” costing only “two or three” casualties a year, the Israeli president turned to Gaza, declaring that “accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century…Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide. And that’s exactly what Mr. Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.” Accusing the New York mayor and his wife of antisemitism and of making New York City dangerous for Jews, Netanyahu also slammed Qatar and Turkey, the leaders of Western European countries who “have chosen to succumb to the antisemitic mobs” and the several hundred people who were protesting his presence outside the UN.
In what must be a first for the General Assembly, two world leaders included in their remarks threats to commit genocide. “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?” Trump pondered from the podium. “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival”? Netanyahu, who is struggling to surmount accusations that he failed to pass on to Israel’s security chiefs the message about an impending Hamas attack that he reportedly received from the UAE president just days before October 7, 2023, ended his speech with a Biblical verse intended to buttress his electoral support. It alluded to the need to fully eradicate Israel’s enemy the Amalekites and was, in the words of Jonathan Ofir, “a dog whistle for genocide.”
The Board of Peace stirs into life
The Board of Peace under Trump’s lifelong chairmanship has seemed all but defunct, as Israel continued its lethal attacks on Gaza and steadily moved its deadly ‘yellow line’ westward to put two thirds of Gaza’s territory off limits to Palestinians. But at a UN side meeting held on Sept. 23, Board of Peace executive member Tony Blair said that the Board had held a year of “intense preparation” to rebuild the new Gaza after it was mandated to do so the previous year by Security Council Resolution 2083 which, Blair claimed, was “a remarkable achievement” that had “ended the formal conflict.” He made no mention of the fact that over 1,440 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces since the Oct. 11, 2025 so-called ‘ceasefire.’
The audience heard reassuring words from the Board’s High Representative Nickolay Mladenov as well as Gen. Jasper Jeffers, the head of the ‘International Stabilization Force,’ who is slated to lead the demilitarization effort, and Dr. Ali Shaath, chair of the 12-member National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAC). Dr. Shaath talked about the 71 different programs being planned by NCAC’s Palestinian ‘technocrats,’ but never mentioned the fact that Israel had still not permitted them to enter Gaza. There were several references by speakers to the hundreds of miles of tunnels that had to be detected and destroyed, but no acknowledgement that it was Israel – not Hamas – which had refused to go along with the Board’s demilitarization roadmap. In what was essentially a fundraising appeal to donors, various presenters spoke of the need to raise $71.4 billion (they said they had $18 billion in pledges and $280 million in hand), with an immediate need for $2.45 billion to clean up the Strip and decommission weapons over the next six months.
The session, which you can watch in its entirety here, was brought to a close by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who thanked Trump for his “great leadership” and said the last year was “the hardest I’ve worked on a project in my life.” He commended the great cooperation between the Board and the UN which, he said, had led to more “efficiency” in getting aid to people directly. Shortly after Kushner spoke as a ‘peacemaker’ at the UN, CNN revealed that his company, Affinity Partners, was the largest investor in Phoenix, a giant Israeli financial firm with substantial investments in the Israeli military.
On Sept. 24, a day after the Board of Peace session, UN Secretary-General António Guterres had a very different message about Gaza for the ministerial meeting of UNRWA. “Humanitarian access remains severely restricted, and the level of human suffering is still off the charts,” he said. “Food is scarce. Shelter is in short supply. Rodents are rampant.” On the same day the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process declared that “the needs are immense and urgent, and they are not being met.” Also on Sept. 24, the Boston Review published an excoriating critique of the Board of Peace entitled “Exit and Exception: The Board of Peace’s model for governing Palestine reflects designs for a new world order,” by human rights lawyer Noura Erakat. “Freed from the constraints of international law,” attorney Erakat writes, “the Board of Peace can neatly align itself with a longtime Trump family interest: real estate development.”
What the ongoing Israeli onslaught has meant for Gaza
On Sept. 27, the UN Human Rights Council issued a blistering attack on Israel’s military operations in Gaza, concluding that “Israeli authorities are responsible for war crimes, including extermination, murder, using starvation as a method of war, forcible transfer.” In his General Assembly speech, Trump had denounced the “craven hypocrites of the Human Rights Council” (along with the International Criminal Court, which he called a “rogue institution” and which the US is threatening with sanctions), and this latest Human Rights Council report will likely intensify the efforts of his administration to further discredit the UN.
After three years of bombardment with, according to Al Jazeera, over 223,000 tonnes (245.815 tons) of explosives – 16 times the size of the Hiroshima atom bomb – signs of human habitation in large areas of the Gaza Strip have been largely erased, as these aerial and satellite images attest.
GazaIndex, a program of the Gaza Genocide Center, is compiling a chilling record of the ongoing genocide, with 74,228 confirmed dead by Oct. 2 (20,179 of them children), an additional 8,000 bodies still beneath the rubble, more than 175,188 wounded, and 90% of the population displaced from their homes, most of them forced to move multiple times. By June 2026, satellite images revealed that 83% of the built environment had been destroyed. In addition to the massive destruction of homes, religious buildings, historic sites and medical facilities, 97% of Gaza’s school buildings have been damaged or destroyed, leaving 658,000 children with no access to formal education. Since the sham ‘ceasefire’ began, the number of buildings destroyed by Israel has reportedly increased by nearly 10%.
As for the economic sector, Pedro Manuel Moreno, the acting secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), reported at a UN press conference on Sept. 24 that 92% of Gaza’s economic sector had been damaged or destroyed, leaving Gaza to suffer “the world’s most severe economic crisis on record.”
While Board of Peace members lauded the progress made during its first year of existence, Israel has for over a year blocked the entry of some 900 all-terrain wheelchairs that had been donated for children who had undergone amputations (Gaza has the highest rate of child amputees in the world). With winter approaching, and tented encampments already swamped with wastewater and overrun by rats, 162,000 tents are estimated to be “unfit to withstand strong winds, rain and cold.” Israel has also blocked the entry of proper shelter and material needed to repair homes, as the slaughter goes on.
On Sept 21, Israeli forces killed four people, including 11-year old Ismail al-Bardawil who was shot in the al-Mawasi ‘safe zone’ encampment, and the following day reportedly dropped foul-smelling ‘skunk water’ on tents around Gaza. Thirteen more Palestinians were killed and scores wounded during Israeli airstrikes on Sept. 27 and 28, and the 263rdPalestinian journalist, Muhammad Abdel Aziz al-Najjar, was murdered on Sept. 30. Israel is meanwhile creating compounds near its military bases along the ‘yellow line’ for at least five Palestinian militias. These collaborators are described here in an important analysis by Forensic Architecture.
Israel is now feeling the impact of Gaza’s severe water crisis and the destruction of its entire wastewater system. Beginning on August 30, five of the six large Israeli coastal desalination plants from which it obtains more than 65% of its drinking water have been forced to close down or work at a reduced rate because of a 60-mile-long algae bloom which moved up the coast, nourished by the tens of thousands of cubic meters of untreated waste discharged into the sea every day from the Gaza Strip. This kind of blowback is likely to intensify, given the toxic contamination of land, water and air caused by Israel’s bombs and the ‘ecocide’ being inflicted on the Gaza Strip.
West Bank experiences record number of settler attacks
On Sept. 23, a group of 29 international and Palestinian NGOs working in the West Bank put out a report entitled Palestinian communities at risk of erasure that sharply contradicts Netanyahu’s downplaying of settler violence at the General Assembly. Showing how “Israeli military control and settler violence are closely intertwined,” the report enumerates over a thousand settler attacks committed in a six-month period (March-August 2026), resulting in more than 70 Palestinian deaths and over 2,000 people being displaced from their homes. Many communities have now become all but unreachable because of settler activity and military restrictions.
The report states: “As Israeli elections approach, the government is not restraining these dynamics, and instead is allowing them to accelerate. Political measures and increasingly extreme rhetoric are emboldening settlers and entrenching impunity, leaving already displaced and isolated communities to face even greater danger.” By the end of September, armed settlers had killed at least 23 West Bank Palestinians during the year. On Oct. 1, 51-year old Mashhour Yassin was murdered on his doorstep when settlers attacked the village of Yusuf.
The Sept. 28th OCHA Humanitarian Situation Report documents 51 settler attacks over a six-day period on agricultural land, irrigation and electricity structures, water tanks, and homes, displacing 147 Palestinians (“more than three times the 2026 weekly average”). The 1,600 Palestinians in the 14 small villages in Masafer Yatta, the setting for the Oscar-winning film ‘No Other Land,’ are now without piped water, as settlers have repeatedly cut their water lines. The impunity enjoyed by settlers was on vivid display on Sept. 28, when over a hundred of them set fire to two Palestinian houses owned by the Toubassi family in the village of Jalud and attacked family members an hour after they returned home after being forcibly displaced in July. The Supreme Court had ordered the army to ensure they could go back, but rather than confront the settlers, the soldiers evacuated the family.
Many of those who have been displaced are from the 12 square kilometer area known as E1 between East Jerusalem and the settlement city of Ma’ale Adumim. Settlement expansion in this area had long been referred to as a ‘red line’ by Europeans powers, as it would cut the West Bank in half and doom lingering aspirations for a ‘two-state solution.’ In August 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that 3,400 housing units would be built there.
On Sept. 8, 2026, as Israel prepared to issue tenders for the units, Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary appointed by the UK’s new prime minister Andy Burnham, told Parliament that, as the International Court of Justice had ruled in July 2024, the entire Israeli occupation was unlawful. Along with 11 other countries (France, Canada, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Sweden) the UK pledged to level sanctions on trade with West Bank settlements. In the case of the UK, the sanctions would not take place for six to nine months, but could eventually have a significant impact, especially on the banking sector. (See the UN’s revised list of 241 companies doing business in settlements here). The Israeli government immediately reacted by closing the British consulate in Jerusalem, removing Britain from the US-led International Gaza Support Center, ending the courses the UK provided to PA security forces, and banning a dozen left-wing Members of Parliament (including former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn) from entering Israel. US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also threatened Britain with potential US countermeasures.
Although the US government remains locked in a tight embrace with Israel, Israeli journalist Amos Harel writes in the Oct. 2nd Haaretz that even the Trump administration is “weighing sanctions on Israel over settler violence.” The Democrats in Congress are meanwhile beginning to more closely reflect the views of the American public. On Sept. 23, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) introduced S.5476, ‘A bill to impose sanctions with respect to foreign persons that have facilitated Israeli settlement construction in the E1 area of the West Bank,’ with MA Sen. Warren as one of 18 original co-sponsors. The term ‘foreign persons’ refers to non US persons. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) has presented a House version, Resolution 10642.
Then, on Sept. 29, all but one Democratic Senator (Fetterman of PA) voted for Senate Resolution 852. Presented by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) with both MA Senators among the co-sponsors, the Resolution details Israel’s human rights abuses: its use of torture, imprisonment of children, the killing of more than one thousand Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 2023 - including at least nine Palestinian Americans - settler violence, the displacement of Palestinians, destruction of their property and water supply, and settlement expansion. It requests the Secretary of State to demand specific information from Israel about its human rights practices in accordance with Section 502(B) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, and to issue a report within 30 days of the passage of the Resolution.
The Resolution was defeated by 51 - 47: a loss, but also a sign that the impunity which Israel has long enjoyed can no longer simply be taken for granted.
Nancy Murray
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
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