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Netanyahu's Maps at the United Nations

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likes to speak with a map in his hand. At the United Nations General Assembly, the one stage every government watches, he has held up maps of the Middle East that erase the Palestinian territories and divide the region into friends of Israel and enemies of Israel, with Iran at the center of the enemies. This page describes those maps and what they show.

September 2023: "The New Middle East"​

On 22 September 2023, two weeks before the Hamas attack of 7 October, Netanyahu held up a map titled "The New Middle East" and said, "This is the new Middle East." The Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi described it in The Nation: Netanyahu "holds up a map that shows Israel stretching 'from the river to the sea'" (The Nation, 22 November 2023). An American commenter summarized: "This map depicted all land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as part of Israel, omitting the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip" (Dane Law on X, 27 August 2025). The Palestinian ambassador to Germany, Laith Arafeh, called it "the greatest insult to every foundational principle of the United Nations."

The speech was about normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia. That is the point: the "new Middle East" Netanyahu offered his Arab partners was one in which the Palestinian territories were already inside Israel.

The blessing and the curse​

Netanyahu has also shown the General Assembly two maps side by side: a "Map of Blessing," coloring Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as partners, and a "Map of Curse," coloring Iraq, Syria, and Iran with its allies as enemies. On both, as the fact-check site Misbar noted, the West Bank and Gaza were drawn as part of Israel, with no State of Palestine (Misbar, 3 December 2024). The Sri Lanka Guardian wrote that the maps "effectively erased the prospect of a Palestinian state" (Sri Lanka Guardian, 13 March 2026). The "curse" map is the one that matters for Americans: it marks Iran as the center of the region Israel must defeat, and within a year Israel and the United States were bombing Iran. See Iran and the Greater Israel Map.

The "day after" map​

According to the Serbian weekly Vreme, a map Netanyahu presented in September 2024 for "the day after" the Gaza war showed the West Bank completely annexed (Vreme, 2 June 2026). One account posted his September 2024 UN appearance with the caption: "NOW IT'S CONFIRMED: THE STORY OF GREATER ISRAEL IS NOT A MYTH, BUT REAL" (Barbarik on X, 28 September 2024).

The maps and the words​

The maps match what Netanyahu says in words. In January 2024: "In any future settlement, Israel must control all the territory west of the Jordan River." In September 2025: "There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River." In June 2026: there is "no room" for a Palestinian state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. At the UN in September 2026 he told Syria's president that "the Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses. You can read it in the Bible." See Netanyahu on the Land, 1996 to 2026.

Evidence rating: CONFIRMED that Netanyahu displayed maps at the UN that show the West Bank and Gaza as Israel.

Status: Benjamin Netanyahu, Rashid Khalidi, and Laith Arafeh are alive. Nothing on this page states that any living person committed a crime.

Sources​

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

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