'On the Verge of Entering Gaza': Netanyahu to US State Lawmakers

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a room of American state legislators at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 15 September 2025, at the opening event of a visit the ministry branded “Fifty States – One Israel”. According to the transcript released by his office, he opened by asking how many in the room were in Israel for the first time, then thanked them for coming and introduced Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, Deputy Minister Sharren Haskel and Israel's ambassador to Washington.

The bulk of the speech was an account of the war as Netanyahu tells it. He described the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, saying 1,200 citizens were murdered and some 250 people taken hostage into Gaza, and said Hezbollah joined the following day. He said Israel had struck Hamas first, then moved north and killed Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah, and that the collapse of the Assad government in Syria followed because Hezbollah could no longer prop it up. He said Israel had acted against Iran's nuclear programme because, in his assessment, Iran was within a year of a weapon, and thanked President Donald Trump and American pilots. On Gaza he said Israel was “circling back… to finish the job” and was “on the verge of entering Gaza”, and that it would not compromise either on returning all the hostages, living and dead, or on eliminating Hamas.

Who was actually in the room

The audience was not Congress. It was serving state legislators (the people who write law in Sacramento, Tallahassee and Bismarck), drawn from all 50 states, in what The Jerusalem Post called the largest-ever delegation of US lawmakers to arrive in Israel, hosted by the Foreign Ministry's North America division. The trip ran from 14 to 18 September 2025. The itinerary included the Knesset, Jerusalem holy sites, the Nova festival memorial, communities near the Gaza border and a question session with President Isaac Herzog, and the Israeli government paid for all of it, including flights, hotels and transport, Delaware Public Media reported. The same report carried criticism from a Delaware legislator who called the visit a propaganda tour, and an acknowledgement from one participant that the volume of cameras and promotion had made him uncomfortable.

The support Netanyahu was worried about

Netanyahu told the legislators there was “an active effort to erode” American support for Israel, and thanked Democrats and Republicans alike. The trend line behind that anxiety is measurable. Gallup reported in February 2026 that for the first time since it began asking in 2001, Americans no longer sympathised more with Israelis than with Palestinians: 41 percent leaned towards the Palestinians and 36 percent towards the Israelis, a gap the pollster noted was not statistically significant. The party split was stark: 65 percent of Democrats sympathised more with Palestinians against 17 percent with Israelis, while 70 percent of Republicans backed Israel.

The 'siege' he described

Netanyahu said Israel faced a campaign of delegitimisation organised, in his words, by China and Qatar and amplified in Western social media, and complained that some European states had stopped shipments of weapons components. He did not name those states in the transcript. One concrete example had arrived a week earlier: on 8 September 2025 Spain announced a package of measures against Israel including a formal total arms embargo, a ban on ships carrying fuel for the Israeli military from docking at Spanish ports, closure of Spanish airspace to aircraft carrying Israeli defence material and a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Al Jazeera reported.

What is still unclear

The transcript is a speech, not a briefing: it contains no operational detail, no timetable for the Gaza operation Netanyahu said Israel was about to begin, and no evidence offered for the claims about Chinese and Qatari coordination. It does not say which European governments halted weapons components, or what Israel intends to do about it beyond producing more at home. The Prime Minister's Office did not publish a question-and-answer session alongside the remarks.