King of Jordan and president of Turkey praise Trump, slam Israel for Gaza war

King Abdullah II, the monarch of Jordan, devoted almost his entire speech at the United Nations General Assembly to slamming Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories and warning that Jerusalem will seek to expand further into the Middle East.

Speaking to the assembly on Tuesday, Abdullah offered brief praise to President Donald Trump’s peace agreement to rebuild Gaza, but accused the Israeli government of ignoring all opportunities to end hostilities in favor of “destruction and discrediting its critics.”

“President Trump has pushed hard for peace and a path to end this war,” the monarch told the gathered world leaders. “But this Israeli government keeps moving the goalposts, continuing its attacks and destruction of civilian infrastructure, refusing to withdraw, and squeezing Palestinians into barely a third of Gaza.”

“This Israeli government understands the power of attention. And lately, it has not liked the attention it’s been getting,” he said.

The Hashemite ruler urged leaders not to think of the West Bank and Gaza as separate issues, telling them that the regions are “two fronts of the same Israeli strategy” and “in both, Palestinians are being killed.”

He called the situation a clear-cut example of “forced displacement,” an action he reminded viewers is considered a “war crime” by the United Nations.

Abdullah’s fury at Israel was matched and exceeded by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who also devoted nearly his entire speech to the Israel-Palestine conflict. He said Israel possessed a “genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing.”

“In Gaza alone, over the past three years, we have lost 74,000 of our brothers and sisters, most of them women and children, mind you… we lost them to what we regard as acts of state terror by Israel,” he said.

Gaza, Erdogan said, had become “the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time.”

The Turkish president’s remarks triggered a walkout of Israel’s delegation.

Erdogan treaded a careful line regarding the Trump administration’s handling of the Palestinian issue, implicitly criticizing the Trump administration when he denounced the withholding of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s visa, though later appealing to the administration’s peace plan, which he said Israel was violating.

He called on all countries to increase pressure on Israel and to recognize a Palestinian state.

Abdullah closed his speech with a warning for the future, warning that Israel has become a “state without restraint” and others should not “assume its ambition stops at Palestine.”

“Syria is the warning the international community is choosing not to see,” he said, warning of “creeping territorial expansion” done “step by calculated step” with Israel “testing how far it can go.”

“It no longer feels compelled to ask ‘Can we get away with this?’ It already knows the answer,” the king said from the podium. “If Israel continues its antagonistic approach in southern Syria, will the international community stand by and let that happen?”

Abdullah’s appeal to Syria puts him in line with the Trump administration, which has repeatedly sided with the new government in Damascus over Jerusalem.

Israel has favored keeping Syria as a weakened state, beginning in the final days of the Assad regime when it destroyed most of the military’s equipment in an intensive bombing campaign. It accompanied this with an expansion of its buffer zone past the Golan Heights into Syria, and still supports a Druze statelet in the south, which revolted after government forces began massacring local Druze civilians.

Despite the U.S.’s opposition to Israel’s repeated interventions in Syria, the issue has been allowed to simmer without blowing up the relationship.

Trump thanked Jordan, along with several other countries, for contributing to stabilization efforts in Gaza during his speech at the assembly. Jordan has long been viewed in Washington as one of the U.S.’s most valuable partners in the Middle East, providing it with a Muslim and Arab foothold in regional negotiations.

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Abdullah’s focus on the Israel-Palestine issue comes as no surprise, as Jordan is one of the most directly affected countries by the conflict. Jordan absorbed the largest share of Palestinians after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and today hosts the largest number of Palestinian refugees. Jordan is also the only Arab country that historically granted citizenship to Palestinians, and today, roughly half of Jordanians are ethnically Palestinian.

The U.S. and Jordan were pushed closer together by the Iran War, after Tehran shifted its attention to U.S. bases in the country following the collapse of the memorandum of understanding in July. Jordan has been targeted in nearly every round of Iranian missile strikes since, in contrast to the focus on the United Arab Emirates early in the war.