TEHRAN -- President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian on Friday denounced frequent applause from U.S. lawmakers for the Israeli prime minister during his address to Congress, noting that applauding a criminal will not result in his absolution.
“The crime of killing innocent people and homeless children cannot be overlooked, nor can the criminal be absolved with a standing ovation,” Pezeshkian wrote on X.
The Iranian president-elect quoted a verse from the Holy Qur’an which says, “Those who do wrong will come to know by what a (great) reverse they will be overturned!”  
In an address to Congress on Wednesday, American lawmakers applauded in multiple intervals prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recount of the Tel Aviv regime’s genocidal war in the Palestinian territory over the past ten months.
Islamic Jihad denounced the speech as “full of lies and slander,” calling on the international community to make utmost effort to “quarantine” him following the regime’s months-long onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip.
“Netanyahu’s speech is full of lies and slander,” the statement said. “Netanyahu’s lies that his army did not kill a single civilian in the attack on Rafah, and is not waging a war of starvation and genocide against the Gaza Strip, indicate his mockery of the world and his shameless indulgence in lies.”
Hamas also termed the Israeli prime minister’s so-called ideas about a “future” for the Gaza Strip that excludes the resistance from the territory’s rule as mere “delusions.”
“We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) affirm that the war criminal Netanyahu’s visions for the future of the Gaza Strip are mere delusions and fantasies he is trying to market,” it said.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise retaliatory operation into the occupied territories.
The regime has been also enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory to a trickle.