Standing Ovation Cannot Exonerate Crimes Against Innocents: Pezeshkian Slams Netanyahu Congressional Address

According to SAEDNEWS, Iran’s President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian has denounced frequent applause from US lawmakers for the Israeli prime minister during his address to Congress, noting that applauding a criminal will not result in his absolution.

"The crime of killing innocent people and homeless children cannot be overlooked, nor can the criminal be absolved with a standing ovation," Pezeshkian wrote in a post published on the social media platform X on Friday in response to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress.

The Iranian president-elect also quoted a verse from the Holy Qur'an which says, "Those who do wrong will come to know by what a (great) reverse they will be overturned!" [26:227]

In an address to Congress on Wednesday, American lawmakers applauded in multiple intervals Netanyahu’s recount of the Tel Aviv regime’s genocidal war in the Palestinian territory over the past ten months.

The Palestinian resistance movement Islamic Jihad denounced the Israeli prime minister’s speech as “full of lies and slander,” calling on the international community to make utmost effort to “quarantine” him following the regime’s months-long onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip.

“Netanyahu’s speech is full of lies and slander,” the statement said. “Netanyahu’s lies that his army did not kill a single civilian in the attack on Rafah, and is not waging a war of starvation and genocide against the Gaza Strip, indicate his mockery of the world and his shameless indulgence in lies.”

Earlier, Hamas also termed the Israeli prime minister’s so-called ideas about a “future” for the Gaza Strip that excludes the resistance from the territory’s rule as mere “delusions.”

“We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) affirm that the war criminal Netanyahu's visions for the future of the Gaza Strip are mere delusions and fantasies he is trying to market,” the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement said.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise retaliatory operation into the occupied territories.

The regime has been also enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory to a trickle.

So far during the military onslaught, the regime has killed at least 39,175 Gazans, most of them women, children, and adolescents. Another 90,403 Palestinians have sustained injuries as well.