Benjamin Netanyahu loves the platform of the United Nations but the UN doesn’t love him.

As he entered, hundreds of diplomats left. He delivered his speech to a chamber more than half empty.

Mr Netanyahu claimed he was not initially going to attend, but was compelled to by the “lies and slanders” he heard from other leaders.

He used the moment to remind the world of 7 October and the ongoing fate of hostages being held inside Gaza.

He justified Israel’s war, claiming without evidence that it is the most moral campaign in history. Israel critics, of which there are many, accuse the country of genocide.

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He pointed the finger at the “goons” in Iran as he has done year after year and described the Iranian axis across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as a curse.

He lambasted the International Criminal Court for seeking arrest warrants against him and defence minister Yoav Gallant.

He invoked biblical references to advocate modern-day peace but insisted his country must keep fighting multiple wars; there was not even a passing glance to the US-French proposal for a truce in Lebanon.

Mr Netanyahu again dedicated time to speak about the prospect of normalisation with Saudi Arabia, something he is desperate for, but the Kingdom’s Crown Prince isn’t.

Riyadh won’t make peace with Israel without a path to an independent Palestinian state, and that is something Mr Netanyahu isn’t willing to give.

Mr Netanyahu does these moments well. He is a master of the media and revels in the moment.

In the end though, we heard nothing new.

It was passionate and it was angry. It had maps as props and a crowd flown in to cheer along.

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But there was no explanation for how the war in Gaza will end, no plan for the ‘day after’ and no idea for “deradicalisation”.

He said Israel must “defeat” Hezbollah but gave no hint of a timeline and no clue what might come next.

It was a speech that will go down well with many here in Israel, their leader defending their country on the world stage.

But Israelis are weary after 12 months of war and many will come away wondering how many more months of conflict lie ahead.

After a week of airstrikes in the neighbourhood of Dahieh, the shock of an explosion is rarely followed by surprise. 

When we arrived in this densely populated part of southern Beirut, the street was filled with glass and rubble and weary-looking faces. This is the fourth time in a week that this area has been hit.

Behind a cordon, we could see a damaged apartment block just down the street. Below, a popular juice shop called “Tasty Bees” had survived unscathed.

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A detachment of Lebanese troops stood guard at the scene, but we knew they were not in charge in this part of the city.

Dahieh is run by the political and military group Hezbollah and we were invited by their security personnel to take a closer look at the site.

The fourth floor was badly damaged by a series of precision-guided missiles.

The outer walls of various apartments had been removed, revealing mattresses, curtains and colourful chandeliers.

The Israeli military claims to have killed a Hezbollah commander called Mohammed Surur in the strike.

The country’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said that he had authorised it and described Surur as the leader of the Iran-backed group’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone division.

Surur’s death has not been confirmed by Hezbollah – but it certainly has not intimidated some of the group’s supporters.

“I’d die for Hezbollah,” shouted one man and he brushed the rubble off the top of his battered-looking car.

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Our tour came as the international community launched an urgent attempt for a temporary truce in a conflict that has killed more than 1,500 this year. But prospects for a ceasefire were quickly blown away by the blast.

At least two have died, with 15 injured in this attack.

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The mayor of the local suburb Atef Mansour gave voice to the feeling shared by many here.

“What happened is an ongoing crime committed by the Israeli enemy, and we witness this scene every day, day after day in a densely populated neighbourhood.”

Yet Hezbollah has continued its military operations, sending 45 rockets into northern Israel. Such attacks invite an inevitable response.

As far as our minders in Dahieh were concerned, the purpose of our visit was clear – to communicate the impact on civilians of such strikes.

Yet we all know the next assault will come soon.

There seemed little sign of any let-up in the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon with a spray of early morning strikes in the south. There were others in the eastern Bekaa Valley and northeast of the capital, Beirut.

While we were in the hills of Mount Lebanon region in the southwest of the country, there were regular airstrikes landing south of us. Israeli drones circled above and we heard sonic booms as Israeli jets broke the sound barrier.

“These are tactics to terrorise us,” one resident in the village of Joun told us.

Weeping women and Al Risala scouts gathered with crowds of other Joun villagers for the funeral of a six-year-old boy, his mother and his father.

The family was one of three inside a home high above the village when the Israeli bomb hit.

There’s nothing left of the home now.

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The father, Khodor Raad, is well-known locally. He ran a taxi service and worked as a welder but was also involved in Hezbollah’s social welfare programmes, according to the village’s residents.

“He was not a fighter,” one Hezbollah representative told us. “The area where he lived would not allow weapons there, for sure.”

The villagers we spoke to told us Khodor’s family had taken in two other families who had been displaced by the recent Israeli bombardment.

One family of three children and their mother was from Syria while the second family, a mother and her two children, had fled the onslaught in the south just a day earlier.

Khodor was the senior adult male in the house. The other males were his young son, Hassan, and two elder brothers, one a teenager.

The airstrike just after 10.30am on Wednesday wiped out the bulk of three families, killing six children, three mothers and the patriarch Khodor.

Hassan’s brothers somehow escaped. The elder of the two, 21-year-old Ahmad, had to be pulled out of the rubble with head wounds and a lacerated hand. Yousuf, 15, seems to have escaped unscathed.

This is the first time Mount Lebanon Governorate has been hit in nearly a year of increasingly deadly exchanges between Israel and Lebanon. During this time (according to the non-profit organisation ACLED) Israel has fired nearly five times as many missiles into Lebanon as Hezbollah has launched into Israel.

But the exchanges until a week ago were mainly confined to the border region, although they’d caused a serious amount of displacement in both Israel and Lebanon. About 60,000 Israelis have fled their homes and 120,000 families have had to abandon their houses on the Lebanese side.

This week though, the massive spike in Israeli airstrikes – more than a thousand in a single day on Monday – plus the Israeli authorities’ warnings to evacuate – prompted another huge wave of people to up and move to try to escape the bombings.

The Lebanese government has estimated the displacement is likely to reach half a million with a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis.

The funerals in Joun have stunned the small community who have opened their homes to thousands of displaced people.

“Please treat our displaced brothers and sisters with courtesy and kindness,” the village representative told the funeral crowds.

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Six-year-old Hassan’s school friends and fellow scouts were among the funeral mourners and his scout leader, who was one of the pallbearers, openly sobbed.

“We are civilians,” said a family relative called Mostafa Issa – despite the presence of young soldiers clad in military-style camouflage outfits.

At the head of the pallbearers was Hassan’s elder brother, Ahmad, also in uniform – a fact which officials attempted to explain away by saying “he’d just put on the uniform for the funeral”.

“The Israelis are claiming they are targeting Hezbollah weapons,” Mostafa Issa told us. “But this family took in two other displaced families! Why would they have weapons? They are civilians and the Israelis are hitting civilians.”

He went on: “These crimes should stop wherever they are being carried out – in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria.”

The crushed family home is a pile of rubble now. Vehicles parked around it, including their neighbours’, are mangled.

School books can be seen half buried in the broken stones, as well as a child’s pair of trousers.

“We are prepared to die,” said one young man called Hussein. “We are not the terrorists! It is the one who is bombing us and our homes who is the terrorist. We are all prepared to die for humanity.”

He went on, his face quivering with emotion: “40,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. And yet it is us who are called the terrorists.”

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Hezbollah is a proscribed terror outfit in Israel, the USA and the UK, among other nations. And it has a fierce control over parts of the country, particularly the south.

It has a powerful weapons cache, including long-range missiles, has tens of thousands of fighters and enjoys financial and intelligence support from Iran.

But the militant group also has a political wing with MPs in parliament and an active social welfare programme running schools, hospitals and aid groups which further cements its grip on parts of the population.

Additional reporting by: camera Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham, and Lebanon producers Jihad Jineid, Sami Zein and Hwaida Saad