Pezeshkian Defies Trump at UNGA, Holds Up Khamenei Photo
At the UN, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian rejected Trump’s “annihilate” threat, held up a photo of Ayatollah Khamenei and refused to reopen Hormuz on U.S. terms.
UNITED NATIONS — September 23, 2026. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian used his General Assembly address on Wednesday to reject Donald Trump’s threat to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic, hold up photographs of wartime dead including the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and insist Iran will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Washington’s terms — while still saying Tehran “extends its hands towards the world.”
“The US president called us terrorists but we are the victims of terrorists,” Pezeshkian told the hall. He displayed images of Khamenei, assassinated in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike at the start of the war in February, and of schoolgirls killed in an alleged U.S. attack on a school in Minab in southern Iran. “They hit us, but we did not bow our heads or bend the knee,” he said. As he spoke, a U.S. official walked out; the Israeli delegation boycotted the address.
The speech answered Trump’s UNGA appearance a day earlier, when the American president framed an existential binary: a deal that would let Iran rebuild, or rapid annihilation of the Islamic Republic. On Tuesday Trump also said Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had held a “very good” three-hour meeting with Iranian officials and that momentum toward an agreement existed — a diplomatic track Pezeshkian’s rhetoric neither closed nor concretized with a new public offer.
Pezeshkian’s Case on Hormuz
On Hormuz, Pezeshkian rejected what he cast as a one-way bargain: free access for others while Iran faces blockade and war pressure through the same waterway. “We cannot have some free access and gain their independence from that waterway while at the same time use that waterway to impose their aggressions upon us,” he said. Tehran’s public conditions in New York still center on lifting the U.S. naval blockade, releasing frozen assets, and ending the war across what Iran calls “resistance” fronts — terms that remain far from Washington’s demand for free navigation and nuclear constraints.
Analysts split on whether the speech opened a real off-ramp. Negar Mortazavi of the Center for International Policy argued Iran wants a way out and may show flexibility short of reviving the expired June memorandum of understanding. Former U.S. diplomat Joey Hood called the address a missed chance, saying familiar defiance without a bold concrete proposal left Trump with little new to answer.
Nearly seven months into a war that has killed thousands, disrupted energy markets, and spread into Lebanon and Yemen, Pezeshkian’s UNGA turn was designed for two audiences: a domestic base that needs defiance after Minab and Khamenei’s killing, and mediators in New York who need proof that diplomacy is still authorized. The walkout and the Hormuz hard line show how thin that bridge remains.
Sources
- Al-Monitor: Iran, US still far apart in peace talks, Iranian official says; Pezeshkian vows no surrender
- AFP: President tells Trump that Iran will never ‘bend at the knee’
One Comment