The war against Hamas “will not end with hostages in Gaza, period,” Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the inaugural JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem on Sunday.
“We haven’t finished the job,” declared Danon, a senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party.
The Israeli diplomat addressed the JNS summit just hours after touring the sites of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre with a group of approximately 30 fellow U.N. ambassadors, he revealed.
“Once people are educated, we will go back to the U.N., we will see the impact. Slowly you build alliances, you build friendships,” he explained, adding: “We have allies, we have friends. They should be more vocal, they should speak up more, but we are not alone.”
Danon said he was “very disappointed” when U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his representative to the world body, but remained optimistic.
“President Trump will appoint a strong ambassador that will help me against all those hostile forces, against the antisemites,” said Danon, expressing hope that Washington would help elect a more pro-Israeli U.N. secretary-general after António Guterres’s term ends.
He called for the United States to impose personal sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights who has repeatedly been criticized over the past years for her anti-Israel and antisemitic remarks.
“She shouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States of America,” he said. “I expect the new administration to be stronger on this issue.”
With regard to the ongoing indirect talks between the United States and Iran, Danon told JNS Features Editor Steve Linde that he was “very skeptical.”
“We know the Iranians, they lie all the time, they are masters of deception,” he said, noting that “only months ago,” Tehran had fired hundreds of ballistic missiles toward the Jewish state.
“We better believe them, 80 years after Auschwitz was liberated,” he said of Tehran’s stated mission of destroying the world’s only Jewish state.