As if to prove Prime Minister Netanyahu’s point that good and evil are inverted at the United Nations, scores of leaders who for a week had listened intently to speeches by representatives of various dictatorships walked out when Israel’s elected leader spoke Friday. Even America merely sent a note-taker to listen to his speech.

While Mr. Netanyahu spoke, Israeli warplanes struck a bunker at Beirut that a government spokesman, Daniel Hagari, said. Reports around the region said the target was the Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah. One Arab paper, Al Arabiya reported that he is not dead, as did several Iranian outlets.

Either way, the strike could have been designed as a message to America and others that Israel is far from ready to let up in its war on Iran-backed Hezbollah. While Tehran might retaliate if the leader of its top proxy is targeted, Mr. Netanyahu warned that Israel has the capacity to hit back. 

“If you strike us, we will strike you,” he said in his speech. “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach.”

With Israelis bracing for what some officials said could turn into a “region-wide” war, Mr. Netanyahu decided to return home, according to Kan news. Initially, he had planned to spend the Sabbath at New York. 

When Mr. Netanyahu took the podium to respond to a week-long attack on Israel, diplomats made a show of leaving the hall. The spectacle, which in the past has been reserved for pariah leaders like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, was accented by the absence of top American officials, who were in town Friday but not present at the UN’s headquarters.

Secretary Blinken, who is negotiating with Israeli officials in an attempt to stop the Israel Defense Force’s advances in the battle against Hezbollah, was among those who were elsewhere. America’s UN ambassador, Linda Thomas Greenfield, apparently had more urgent meetings, and even her deputy, Robert Wood, was absent during an American ally’s speech. 

When Mr. Netanyahu promised that peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia is “closer than you think,” a UN camera sought to catch a Riyadh reaction. All it found was an empty Saudi seat. Other heads of state, top diplomats, and UN ambassadors made a point of leaving the hall just as Mr. Netnayahu took the podium. 

“In this very hall, as I’ve just heard, good is portrayed as evil and evil is portrayed as good,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his speech. He could have referred to a host of speeches during this week’s annual gabfest, the General Assembly. Many of them were largely dedicated to taking Israel to task and praising its foes.

Preceding the Israeli premier on Friday was the prime minister of Slovenia, Robert Golob, who said Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. “Mr. Netanyahu, end this war now,” he concluded, as the hall burst into applause. Mr. Golob was followed by Pakistan’s premier, who was also cheered for denouncing Israel and comparing suffering Palestinians to Pakistan’s allies in Kashmir.  

“What hypocrisy, what double standard, what a joke,” Mr. Netanayhu said, citing the fact that the General Assembly habitually issues far more anti-Israel resolutions than those targeting all other countries combined. UN organs, he said, have become a “swamp of antisemitic bile.”  

The speech was organized around presenting the world with a choice between the “blessing” of a peaceful and prosperous Mideast and the “curse” of an Iran-led region, which would “return all of us to a dark age of tyranny and terror,” the premier said. Israel, he said, represents the blessing even as it fights the curse of Iran and its proxies.    

“We are winning,” Mr. Netanayhu told the General Assembly. As he spoke, the IDF spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, confirmed that the Israeli air force struck a Hezbollah headquarters in southern Beirut. Video clips showed large explosions. 

Mr. Blinken, meanwhile, huddled with several counterparts at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. In a conversation with his United Arab Emirates counterpart, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahya, the secretary “stressed  the importance of reaching an agreement on a 21-day cease-fire across the Israel-Lebanon border,” according to the Department of State. 

Perhaps in a reference to the French-American call for a three-week cease-fire in Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu reminded the General Assembly that Hezbollah has a lot of French and American blood on its hands. “As long as Hezbollah chooses the path of war,” he said, “Israel has no choice, and Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their home safely — and that’s exactly what we’re doing.” 

Yet a top aide to the premier, Ron Dermer, was negotiating with Mr. Blinken. Landing at New York Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu vowed to defy the French-American plan and to continue the war. On Friday morning, though, his office posted on X a statement saying that America’s “role is indispensable in advancing stability and security in the region”

Israel, the post said, “shares the aims of the U.S.-led initiative of enabling people along our northern border to return safely and securely to their homes.” It did not however mention an agreement to pause the attack on Hezbollah targets.