IRAN’S President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian has criticised the repeated applause from US lawmakers for the Israeli Prime Minister during his address to Congress, asserting that such recognition will not absolve criminal actions.
‘The crime of killing innocent people and homeless children cannot be overlooked, nor can the criminal be absolved with a standing ovation,’ Pezeshkian wrote on the social media platform X, responding to Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress.
In his address on Wednesday, American lawmakers frequently applauded Netanyahu’s recount of the Tel Aviv regime’s actions in Palestinian territories over the past ten months.
The Palestinian resistance movement Islamic Jihad condemned his speech, labelling it ‘full of lies and slander’, and urged the international community to ‘quarantine’ him, following the regime’s prolonged assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
‘Netanyahu’s speech is full of lies and slander,’ stated Islamic Jihad. ‘Netanyahu’s claims that his army did not kill a single civilian in the attack on Rafah, and is not waging a war of starvation and genocide against the Gaza Strip, reflect his mockery of the world and his shameless indulgence in lies.’
Previously, Hamas also dismissed Netanyahu’s proposed ‘future’ for Gaza, which excludes the resistance from the territory’s governance, as mere ‘delusions’.
‘We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) affirm that the war criminal Netanyahu’s visions for the future of the Gaza Strip are mere delusions and fantasies he is trying to market,’ declared the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement.
Israel initiated the war on Gaza on October 7 following a surprise retaliatory operation by Palestinian resistance groups in the occupied territories. The regime has also been enforcing a total siege on the coastal territory, drastically reducing the flow of food, medicine, electricity, and water into the Gaza Strip. During this military onslaught, at least 39,175 Gazans, most of them women, children, and adolescents, have been killed. Additionally, 90,403 Palestinians have sustained injuries.
Meanwhile, twelve Republican US senators have put forward a bill to prohibit federal contracts with organisations that boycott Israel. The primary sponsor of this legislation, named the Countering Hate Against Israel by Federal Contractors (Chai) Act, Senator Jim Risch, asserted in a press release that ‘businesses who boycott Israel only seek to normalise anti-Semitism.’
A similar bill was presented in the House of Representatives in July last year but remains in the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, awaiting a vote.
In February, the House approved an anti-boycott act that bans American nationals from participating in boycotts organised by any ‘international governmental organisation’ against US allies. The IGO Anti-Boycott Act has raised concerns among supporters of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to pressure Israel to comply with international law and has been active for 15 years.
The Chai Act represents a federal extension of various anti-BDS laws that have been enacted at state levels. Currently, 28 US states prohibit agencies from working with companies that boycott Israel, while six others have enacted similar measures through executive orders, according to reports.
The American Civil Liberties Union has stated that anti-BDS laws infringe upon the First Amendment right to boycott. An article published by the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law has examined the arguments in support of anti-BDS laws and concluded that ‘many of the anti-BDS laws likely run foul of the First Amendment by imposing unconstitutional conditions on government contractors and/or beneficiaries of public funding’.
While numerous lawmakers have defended anti-BDS laws as measures against discrimination, an article in The Harvard Law Review argued that ‘anti-BDS laws are not backed by a valid anti-discrimination interest’.
