Pezeshkian holds up Khamenei image in UN General Assembly address

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23, 2026, holding up an image of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as he spoke. Ynet reported that Pezeshkian told delegates that Iranians were themselves the victims of terrorism and that the Islamic Republic would not surrender.

In the same address, Pezeshkian argued that Israel is treated differently from Iran on nuclear matters, saying it was unjust that Israel holds atomic weapons while nuclear inspectors are sent to Tehran. The Jerusalem Post reported that he framed the presence of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog based in Vienna, as evidence of a double standard.

What was said from the podium

According to Ynet's account of the speech, Pezeshkian rejected the charge that Iran sponsors terrorism and turned it back on the United States and Israel, saying they carry it out in practice. He said a school had been bombed and girls killed, and that Iran's own response had not been directed at a civilian population. He also contrasted the treatment of the two states: Israel kills and sanctions are imposed on Iran, he said, and Israel holds atomic bombs while nuclear inspectors are dispatched to his country.

Pezeshkian has been Iran's president since winning the election that followed the death of Ebrahim Raisi. The presidency in Iran is subordinate to the office of the supreme leader, who holds final authority over foreign policy, the armed forces and the nuclear file. That is the context for the image Pezeshkian displayed during the address, though the two reports describe it differently, and the difference matters.

A disagreement between the two accounts

Ynet described the president as raising a picture of Khamenei during the speech. The Jerusalem Post's photograph caption, credited to UN TV, described the item as a memorial flyer for the former Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The two descriptions are not the same: one implies a portrait held aloft in a political gesture, the other implies a commemoration of a leader who is no longer in office or alive. Neither report, as available here, explains the discrepancy, and we are not resolving it. Readers should treat the status of Khamenei as described inconsistently across the two accounts.

The Trump speech the day before

Ynet reported that Pezeshkian spoke a day after US President Donald Trump used the same General Assembly platform to threaten to destroy the Islamic Republic if no agreement is reached. Trump's remark, as characterised in that report, tied the survival of the Iranian state to the outcome of negotiations, without the report specifying which negotiations or what terms were on the table.

The General Assembly's annual high-level debate brings heads of state and government to UN headquarters in New York each September, with speeches delivered in sequence over several days. It is one of the few settings in which Iranian and American leaders address the same hall within a day of each other, and Iranian presidents have long used the slot to present Tehran's case to a global audience rather than to a domestic one.

The aviation dispute

Ynet also reported that Iran is threatening to respond to what it calls an air blockade against its aircraft by paralysing airports in the Gulf. The report does not set out who imposed the restrictions on Iranian aircraft, when they took effect, or which Gulf airports Tehran has in mind. No mechanism for such a response is described, and no Iranian official is named as the source of the threat in the material available.

Nuclear inspections, in brief

The International Atomic Energy Agency monitors declared nuclear material in member states under safeguards agreements and reports to its Board of Governors. Israel is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and maintains a long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying that it possesses nuclear weapons. Pezeshkian's complaint, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, rests on that asymmetry: inspectors in Iran, no comparable regime in Israel.

What the reports do not say

The material here does not provide the full text of the address or a verbatim transcript, and the quoted lines are short renderings rather than an official English text released by Iran. The reports do not identify the school bombing Pezeshkian referred to, or give a date, location or casualty figure for it. They do not record any Israeli, American or UN response to the speech. They do not say how long he spoke, whether delegations walked out, or what else the address covered. The exact wording and context of Trump's reported threat is not reproduced. And the conflicting descriptions of the image of Khamenei remain unexplained in both accounts.