In the wake of widespread international media reports claiming that Barbados was among the roughly 70 nations that staged a walkout or skipped the United Nations General Assembly session when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his keynote address last Thursday, the Office of the Prime Minister of Barbados has issued an official rebuttal setting the record straight.
Many global news organizations had claimed that Barbados, alongside a number of other Caribbean nations, joined the coordinated absence to protest ongoing Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, which have drawn sharp international criticism in recent months. The walkout was framed as a collective stand against the humanitarian impact of Israel’s campaign in the region.
But in a formal public statement released on Sunday, the Barbados Prime Minister’s Office pushed back against these accounts. The statement confirmed that the entire Barbadian delegation, including sitting Prime Minister Mia Mottley, stayed in their seats throughout Netanyahu’s address. Rather than joining the walkout, the delegation was using the time to put the final touches on Mottley’s own address to the UNGA, which the prime minister delivered later that same Thursday afternoon.
The statement also noted that Mottley’s speech to the assembly explicitly laid out Barbados’s formal stance on not only the current active conflict in Gaza, but also the decades-long, unresolved Arab-Israeli dispute that has shaped regional and global politics for generations. No further details on the content of that stance were included in the Prime Minister’s Office rebuttal.