East Jerusalem ‘must be recognised as capital of independent Palestine,’ insists PA

Any just solution [for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] must recognise East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state, a spokesman of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas insisted on Friday.

“Tension and chaos will continue dominating the region and the world as long as the Palestinian issue remains unresolved,” Nabil Abu-Rudeineh told Wafa, the official Palestian Authority news agency, adding:

The international legitimacy, which recognised the state of Palestine in the UN General Assembly on 29 November, 2012 and delegitimised the occupation, will alone create an appropriate atmosphere for resolving all the crises in the region and regain the balance of US-Arab relations.

Read: UN General Assembly affirms illegality of Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem

The PA official said that Abbas is still committed to a “just peace” based on the two-state solution, the Arab and international legitimacy and the Arab peace initiative. He noted that the region is facing “hard challenges” and it must not lose sight of the rights of the Palestinians in the middle of them all.

In a related issue, on Friday evening, Reuters and other news agencies reported an American official saying that President Donald Trump is to deliver a speech this week in which he might recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

During his electoral campaign, Trump pledged to move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967 and has since annexed in a move unrecognised by most of the international community. However, the official said that the US President had not reached a final decision in this regard.

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