The New York Times had helped spread a blood libel against Israel, the the motivation behind accusations of genocide against Israel “is to prepare the next genocide against us,” Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Yehiel Leiter said on Sunday.
Addressing the 43rd International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries in New York, Leiter recounted a meeting with the paper’s editorial board.
“Exactly one year ago, in two days, on Nov. 10, I met with the editorial board of The New York Times,” Leiter related. “I went into a room. They were the jury. They were the judge. They were the firing squad—15 editors with another six on the screen. And they were accusing me. They were accusing the government of Israel they were accusing chayalei tzahal [the soldiers of Israel] of a genocide, of starving people to death.”
Leiter presented the editors with facts, he said: the number of trucks carrying humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip every day; how soldiers risked their lives to protect non-combatants; and how the combatant-to-civilian ratio in the war was the lowest in modern history.
In response, he said, “they gave me feelings.”
About 45 minutes into the conversation, one editor objected by saying “everybody can’t be wrong.” Leiter replied that “not everybody is wrong. Not everybody thinks that we’re committing genocide.”
To the extent that everyone does think so, Leiter told the editor, it was the Times that was responsible.
He cited as an example a July 2025 Times report titled “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” featuring a photo of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, an 18-month-old Palestinian from Gaza. Mohammed was emaciated. “Anybody who saw the picture immediately thought of the Holocaust,” Leiter said. “So now we were the perpetrators of genocide. Once we were the victims, and now we’re the Nazis.”
What the Times had neglected to mention, Leiter told the editor, is that the boy suffered from a genetic disease, cerebral palsy and other illnesses. The Times also cropped from the picture the boy’s perfectly healthy brother.
“The senior editor of The New York Times said to me, ‘Ambassador, don’t you think you’re making too much of a misappropriation?’ I said ‘No, that’s not a misappropriation. That’s a blood libel.’”
The ambassador told the audience: “There is no difference between what is being done to us today and what was done to our grandparents in the ghettos of Europe 800 years ago. This is a blood libel. This is very serious. We have to know how to identify what the enemy is and who the enemy is. This is not another antisemitic rant. Please understand, this is a blood libel, and a blood libel will cost lives. And the reason why they are accusing us of genocide is to prepare the next genocide against us.
“Hitler didn’t just happen; it was decades of preparation of demonizing and delegitimizing Jews. And now through the State of Israel, through the Jewish state, there is an attempt to delegitimize and disenfranchise Jews as Jews. We have to call it for what it is. We have to identify the problem. And we have to fight it. We fight it by knowing who we are. We fight it by knowing who our friends are. And we fight this by knowing who the enemy is and by identifying them as the enemy and calling them out as the enemy,” Leiter said.
🔥MUST WATCH: Dr. Yechiel (Michael) Leiter — Israel’s Ambassador to the United States - speaks at Kinus Hashluchim and tells an insane story about him meeting the vile anti-Semitic editorial board of the NY Times. pic.twitter.com/9OiRiExNXX
— Moshe Schwartz (@YWNReporter) November 8, 2026
