Iran’s president delivered a forceful message to the United States at the United Nations General Assembly, declaring that his country would not “bend at the knee” under pressure.
“(US President Donald Trump) must know that the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions, increased pressure, increased bullying. We will never bow our head or bend at the knee,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said.
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While insisting that Iran would not surrender in its war with the US, Mr Pezeshkian said Tehran still believed diplomacy offered a path toward ending the conflict.
The US delegation left the chamber as President Pezeshkian began speaking.
Masoud Pezeshkian also held up a poster of assassinated Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei
The Strait of Hormuz, a vital passage that carried a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas before the war, has emerged as one of the central flashpoints between Iran and the US.
“It cannot be the case that everyone benefits from the Strait of Hormuz while we are denied access to shipping through this waterway,” Mr Pezeshkian said.
“The permanent deployment of hostile fleets and the expansion of the war will not lead to peace.”
In his first appearance at the UN since the US attack on the Islamic republic, President Pezeshkian said Iran had never initiated a war.
“Iran has never ever been an aggressor, has never started a war and has always shown her commitment to the negotiating table. They imposed the war on us, but we proved that we’re not afraid of fighting,” he said.
The Iranian leader also displayed a poster of a school in Minab, where more than 150 people were killed during US attacks on Iran in February.
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A UN fact-finding mission on Iran said it had reasonable grounds to believe that the US carried out two military strikes on the school and a sports facility in Minab, describing them as war crimes.
Mr Pezeshkian also held up an image of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US attack in February.
He addressed the 193-member General Assembly one day after US President Donald Trump made his own speech.
Mr Trump used that address to defend his war on Iran, saying he had stopped Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and warning that he could “annihilate the Islamic Republic” if no agreement was reached to end the fighting.
All but one member of the Iranian delegation walked out during Donald Trump’s speech
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Mr Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner on the sidelines of the UN’s main diplomatic gathering.
Mr Araghchi said Iran was seeking “the immediate lifting of the (US) naval blockade, the prompt payment of all Iranian assets that have been frozen, and an end to the war on all resistance fronts”, state news agency IRIB reported.
Outside the UN yesterday, protesters held a vigil to demonstrate against Iran’s use of the death penalty.
Ukraine, AI showdown dominate proceedings
Alongside the conflict in the Middle East, Russia’s war against Ukraine is set to remain a major issue among the world’s diplomats.
A Security Council meeting on Ukraine is scheduled for 4pm Irish time, and President Volodymyr Zelensky is also due to address the UN General Assembly.
After meeting Mr Trump yesterday, Mr Zelensky said the US and Ukraine wanted the war with Russia to end “before winter”.
He said he was prepared to stop strikes on Russian energy sites if Moscow agreed to take the same step.
The future of artificial intelligence has also become a defining issue at the gathering of world leaders.
After weeks of global headlines warning of the dangers of uncontrollable AI, along with calls to slow its development, industry leaders are due to brief an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
US President Donald Trump met Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines
Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Clement Delangue of Hugging Face will brief the 15-strong council, the United Nation’s top body.
Hugging Face, a repository for AI models, was recently targeted in a cyberattack by autonomous OpenAI software, the first in a sequence of incidents that have intensified concern about the technology’s rapid evolution.
During his speech, Mr Trump rejected international regulation of AI, dismissing such proposals as a “globalist scheme”.
“The very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming… are now saying that AI is going to kill us all,” Mr Trump said.
Hours later, French President Emmanuel Macron used his address to call forcefully for an open-source AI model that would not depend on either the US or China.
“I don’t want anyone to become the vassal of one of the great powers. Rather, we must come together to build an open-source frontier model, a cutting-edge model,” he said.
‘To the victor belong the spoils’ – Trump on Venezuela deal
Mr Trump met Venezuela’s interim leader Delcy Rodriguez in person for the first time yesterday, with the pair discussing energy and security, she said.
Ms Rodriguez, who is due to address the UN General Assembly today, is the first Venezuelan head of state to visit since deposed president Nicolas Maduro was captured in a US military raid in January.
In a message posted on X alongside a photograph of the two leaders smiling, she called the meeting on the sidelines of the assembly in the US “historic”.
Sostuvimos una histórica reunión con el presidente de los Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, con quien conversamos sobre el fortalecimiento de la relación bilateral entre nuestros países y el avance de una agenda de cooperación en áreas estratégicas como energía, minería, seguridad pic.twitter.com/pyJ6FnQkBH
— Delcy Rodríguez (@delcyrodriguezv) September 23, 2026
She said the discussions focused on “strengthening the bilateral relationship between our countries and moving forward with a cooperation agenda in strategic areas such as energy, mining, and security”.
Several senior US officials also took part in the meeting, including top advisor Stephen Miller, chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a White House official said.
Ms Rodriguez served as vice president under Mr Maduro but has so far complied with US demands, including allowing the US access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world.
Mr Trump referred to Venezuela during his UN address yesterday, saying: “When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60% of the oil in the world.”
“To the victor belong the spoils,” he added.
