Claim: Israel apologised to Pakistan during a United Nations Security Council’s emergency meeting this month.
Fact: While Israel did apologise, it was perfunctory as the Israeli ambassador then repeated the point Pakistan’s representative rebutted to.
On 12 September 2025, an X (formerly Twitter) user posted a video of the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations apologizing to Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations for his speech. The post is captioned,
“After Pakistan’s response, the Israeli delegate APOLOGIZES to Pakistan 🇵🇰
Listen up‼️We neither need your “apology”, nor your “sympathy”, we are PAKISTAN & we KNOW, how to “manage” a bully, rest assured we aren’t “Building One”, we have “ONE”.
MAY ALLAH ALMIGHTY BLESS THE SOUL OF DR. ABDUL QADEER KHAN, AMEEN 🇵🇰”.
Israel’s strike on Qatar
On 9 September 2025, Israel launched an airstrike in Doha, Qatar, targeting senior Hamas leaders who were meeting to discuss a US-backed ceasefire proposal. The attack struck a residential complex in the Leqtaifiya district, killing at least six people, including a Qatari security officer. While Hamas stated that lower-level members were killed, the high-level Hamas targets survived.
Qatar condemned the act as cowardly and a violation of international law. Analysts noted that this strike marks a significant escalation and a reexamination of security systems by Gulf States as it is one of the first known Israeli strikes on the territory of a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search using key stills from the video and found it was a clip of a tense exchange between the representatives of Pakistan and Israel during a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting in New York on 11 September. At the start of the meeting, Council members issued a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Qatar’s capital city, Doha. The statement was signed by all 15 members of the Council, including Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States, according to reports.
US Ambassador Dorothy Shea also expressed disapproval of Israel’s actions, saying, “Unilateral bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation working very hard and bravely taking risks alongside the United States to broker peace, does not advance Israel’s or America’s goals.”
In response to the strong disapproval of Israel’s unilateral actions in Qatar, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon, defended Israel’s actions by drawing a parallel to the United States’ Operation Neptune Star, a unilateral action taken by the US to eliminate al-Qaeda’s co-founder, Osama Bin Laden, in Pakistan without informing the Pakistani government of the operation and thus violating Pakistan’s sovereignty.
Danon said, “When bin Laden was eliminated in Pakistan, the question asked was not ‘why target a terrorist on foreign soil’? No one asked that question. The question was, ‘Why was a terrorist given shelter at all?’ The same question must be asked today. There was no immunity for bin Laden, and there can be no immunity for Hamas,” while pointing his hand towards Pakistan’s UN Ambassador.
In response to this statement, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, expressed his strong disapproval of what he described as a “false equivalence”, saying that Israel was “ pointing fingers on others, (and making) baseless assertions primarily aimed at masking its own illegal actions and violations”.
He further rebutted: “Israel also chose to refer to an unrelated incident and make misleading remarks regarding Pakistan in an effort to justify its own illegal actions and violations of international law. Pakistan’s position on that incident has been clearly stated and is publicly available.”
Ahmed further defended Pakistan’s position by pointing out that: “The international community is well aware of Pakistan’s frontline role and sacrifices in the international community’s fight against terrorism. The entire world including our partners acknowledge that al-Qaeda was largely decimated due to Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts and we remain committed in this global collective endeavor.”
Danon’s response to Ahmed’s strong critique is the source of the viral clip, as the Israeli Ambassador does indeed apologise to the Pakistani representative, as can be seen here at the 08:36 time stamp. However, to observers of the full exchange the apology was an empty one as there was no genuine retraction or acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
Danon then reiterates the point that Ahmed took offense to, saying, “You know, maybe you got offended from the word of my speech and I apologize for that. But I make sure that in my speech I stick to the facts and the fact is that Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, and no one condemned the US.”
He then added: “You cannot change the fact that 9/11 happened… You cannot change the fact that Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan, and he was killed on your territory. But I would ask you, when you criticise us, and I’m sure it will continue in the future, think about the issue of double standards, which standards you apply to your country and which standards you apply to Israel.”
Thus, we find the claim to be misleading as the Israeli ambassador’s apology was not a sincere apology or a retraction of the parallel they drew with the US operation to eliminate Bin Laden. It was more of a rhetorical move to restate and reinforce his original criticism of Pakistan while appearing conciliatory on the surface.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found posts regarding this apology on Facebook here and here.
Conclusion: While it is true that the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, apologized to Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, it was more of a rhetorical apology. It was not a genuine retraction as the Israeli ambassador then repeated the point that Ahmed took offense to.
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