Far-left President of Chile Gabriel Boric claimed during his Tuesday speech at the U.N. General Assembly that he would like to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu face trial at international courts over his role in the “genocide” in Gaza.
Boric’s participation at the U.N. marked his final speech at the General Assembly. Boric, whose term is slated to conclude in March 2026, is barred from seeking immediate reelection in the upcoming November presidential election as per Chile’s constitution.
The Chilean far-left president used his platform at the U.N. General Assembly to condemn Netanyahu over the ongoing “genocide” in Gaza, as well as other actions involving Israel, such as the surprise airstrike against Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, and strikes on Iran. The Chilean president is one of the leftist Latin American heads of state who have condemned Israel the most since the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel and the country’s subsequent military response.
Boric prefaced his condemnation of Netanyahu and Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza by describing the situation as a “global crisis” and said that, “at this point, I don’t know what to say about Gaza because so much has already been said, both here and elsewhere, but above and beyond our words, whatever they may be, resound the dead eyes of those who, though innocent, have lost their lives.”
“Today, in 2025, thousands of innocent human beings are losing their lives simply because they are Palestinian, just as 80 years ago millions lost their lives simply because they were Jewish,” Boric claimed.
Boric, who in June accused Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing [against] the Palestinian people,” continued by proclaiming that one of the problems humanity faces is that “pain often breeds hatred,” and hatred must be faced and fought by transforming the “desire to hate into a desire of justice.”
“Make no concessions to violence. I don’t want to see Netanyahu destroyed by a missile alongside his family. I want to see Netanyahu and those responsible for the genocide against the Palestinian people brought before an international court of justice,” Boric said.
After proclaiming that he would like to see Netanyahu tried for “genocide,” Boric claimed that the ongoing situation in Ukraine also affects Chile just as Gaza does. The president stressed, “our hearts cannot – we cannot allow them to remain unmoved in the face of pain, in the face of the needs of others like us.”
“That is precisely why we have established rules, rules that represent advances in civilization, the result of learning from the greatest tragedies we have faced as humanity,” he continued. “And those rules, and it must be said from this platform and acted upon from this instance, are not being respected today.”
“Because let us say it loud and clear, it is not right to invite a neutral country to negotiate and then assassinate your counterpart, violating that country’s sovereignty, as was done in Doha, Qatar,” Boric claimed. “It is not right to bomb a country’s nuclear facilities, just as it was not right yesterday to invade Iraq on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.”
Revelations by the independent group WikiLeaks in 2010 indicated that American troops did, in fact, find weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
“It is not right to invade a sovereign country like Ukraine and then impose negotiations on a fait accompli and expect us all to simply resign ourselves to it,” the Chilean president continued.
Boric, without directly mentioning anyone by name, criticized those who have stood at the U.N. podium to deny “global warming” climate alarmism, question vaccines, and raise concerns over its alleged links to autism.
“We can, of course, discuss the best ways to tackle global warming or who is more responsible than others, but we cannot deny it. We can discuss how the Nazis came to rule over a significant part of Europe, but we cannot deny the Holocaust,” Boric said. “We can study the side effects of a vaccine, but we cannot claim without evidence that vaccines cause autism.”
Towards the end of his speech, Boric announced that Chile will officially present the candidacy of socialist former President Michelle Bachelet to be the next U.N. Secretary-General and claimed that through her leadership, the United Nations could recover “credibility, effectiveness, and purpose in relation to the challenges of our time.”
Bachelet, who served as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights between 2018 and 2022, is part of the Chilean delegation and was present during Boric’s speech. Her legacy as high commissioner includes a widely condemned report exonerating China of the genocide of Uyghur and other Turkic peoples in occupied East Turkistan, published after Bachelet praised the Chinese Communist Party’s abhorrent human rights record. Bachelet refused to seek a second term running the U.N. human rights office following the report.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
