EditMacron’s Hamas line handed Netanyahu a gift – and buried the rest of his UN speech
A high-profile claim was factually wrong, poorly defended afterward, and perfectly timed for the adversary the French president was trying to constrain
On Tuesday evening at the UN General Assembly, Emmanuel Macron delivered what was meant to be a farewell address that mixed a defence of multilateralism, a rebuke of Donald Trump’s Gaza “peace,” and a warning that Israeli policy in the West Bank was making a two-state outcome impossible.
At UN, Macron calls Trump’s Gaza “peace” a spectacle of shame
The sentence that travelled was this one: “Regardez ce qui se passe en Cisjordanie, où chaque jour des violations sont faites. Au nom de quoi ? Le Hamas n’a jamais sévi en Cisjordanie.”
UN interpreters rendered it as Hamas having “never been very active” or “never operated” there. The French verb is stronger. Sévir means to rage, to be rampant, to wreak havoc, to operate with force. It does not mean “govern.” Hamas has never ruled the West Bank the way it ruled Gaza. It has, for nearly four decades, maintained networks, cells, and a record of attacks there. That record includes suicide bombings from the 1990s onward, infrastructure built during the First Intifada, and operations that Israeli officials say continue almost daily. Two days before Macron spoke, Netanel Shukrun, a French-Israeli father of six, was killed near a spring in the Binyamin area; Israeli authorities attributed the attack to a Hamas operative.
The Israeli reaction was immediate and unified across the usual divides. Netanyahu’s office called the remark a “grotesque absurdity” and said Hamas terrorists “carry out attacks against Jews almost every day.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Macron was “lying.” Opposition figure Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF commander in the West Bank, said the comment was “extremely divorced from the reality on the ground.” The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called the speech out of touch. Attention snapped to the phrase. The rest of the address – the “spectacle of shame” line about Trump’s Gaza diplomacy, the warning about the law of the jungle, the argument that violating neighbors’ sovereignty weakens Israel’s own security – was eclipsed.
That is the political cost. On LCI, the political analyst Dominique Moïsi described the sentence as a “present” to Netanyahu. Isolated on settlement policy and facing another UN appearance of his own, the Israeli prime minister received a factual error he could treat as proof that criticism of Israel is built on ignorance. The gift was not subtle.
French officials tried to walk it back. A diplomatic source told the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel that the phrase had been “misinterpreted” and that Macron meant Hamas has never governed the West Bank. The Élysée later said he had used sévir in the sense of “direct” or “rule,” and that accusing France of denying terrorism was “unworthy.” The Israeli ambassador in Paris, Joshua Zarca, opened a dictionary: sévir is not an obscure synonym for “gouverner.” The clarification sounded like after-the-fact semantics. It did not restore the speech.
The broader speech, which EUalive reported at the time, had a clear structure: recognition of Palestine without action on Gaza lacks credibility; a proclaimed peace that does not reopen humanitarian access is a spectacle; daily violations in the West Bank are not justified by Hamas rule there because Hamas does not rule there. The last clause was the one that collapsed. A president who wanted to argue that Israeli policy in the West Bank is self-defeating instead gave Jerusalem a sentence it could quote as evidence that Paris does not know the file.
That is the blunder. Not a translation glitch in isolation, and not a minor slip of vocabulary. A high-profile claim that was factually wrong on its face, poorly defended afterward, and perfectly timed for the adversary Macron was trying to constrain.
Caption: President of France Emmanuel Macron speaks during the General Debate of the 81st session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York, New York, USA, 22 September 2026. EPA/SARAH YENESEL
Updated: September 24, 2026 - 05:32
