At UN, Jordan’s Abdullah says Israeli policies in Gaza, West Bank aim to make Palestinian state ‘impossible’

By Nava Freiberg

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22 September 2026, 6:52 pm

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Nava Freiberg is The Times of Israel's deputy diplomatic correspondent.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, September 22, 2026. (AP/Yuki Iwamura)

Jordan’s King Abdullah II berates Israeli military action in Gaza and recent West Bank policies during his address at the UN General Assembly in New York, calling on the international community to take greater action against them.

A few minutes into his speech, Abdullah enters into a lengthy series of accusations against the Israeli government, saying it is prolonging the war in Gaza and undermining efforts by US President Donald Trump to bring it to an end, as well as allowing a “fundamental shift” to take place in the West Bank through “de facto annexation” and rising settler violence.

“President Trump has pushed hard for peace and a path to end this war,” Abdullah tells the assembly. “But this Israeli government keeps moving the goalposts, continuing its attacks and destruction of civilian infrastructure, refusing to withdraw, and squeezing Palestinians into barely a third of Gaza,” he says, asserting that 300 Palestinian children were killed in the first 300 days since the US-brokered hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas last October, and that Jordanian field hospitals in Gaza have been targeted.

Abdullah says the Gaza war, which Israel launched in response to the Hamas-led invasion and massacre in October 2023, is the result of decades in which the international community chose to “manage” rather than resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that repeated Israeli actions once treated as “temporary” have gradually “become policy.”

Turning to the West Bank, Abdullah says “what was once a creeping process has exploded into something far more aggressive,” pointing to “settler violence,” “land seizures,” settlement expansion and the “forcible transfer” of Palestinians.

In both Gaza and the West Bank, Abdullah charges, “the reality on the ground is being remade — Gaza through destruction, the West Bank through de facto annexation… The objective is the same: to make a viable Palestinian state impossible.”