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Abbas: ‘Israel decided not to be our partner in peace process’

September 24, 2022 at 10:51 am

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas addresses during the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at UN Headquarters in New York, United States on September 23, 2022. [Palestinian Presidency – Anadolu Agency]

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas told world leaders gathering at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on Friday that Israel has decided not to be a partner for Palestinians in the peace process.

“Israel has decided not to be our partner in the peace process,” Abbas announced, stating: “Israel is the side that destroyed the Oslo Accords it signed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.”

Abbas also expressed: “It is the one that, with its current policy, has premeditated and determined to destroy the two-state solution, which proves with conclusive evidence that it does not believe in peace, but in the policy of imposing a fait accompli by brutal force and aggression.”

Therefore, according to Abbas, Israel’s relations with Palestinians became a relationship of an occupation state with an occupied nation. “We will not deal with Israel except on this basis, and we demand the international community to do the same,” he asserted, stressing: “This is Israel’s choice, not ours.”

Abbas added: “Israel is carrying out a frantic campaign to confiscate our lands and spread its colonial settlements and plunder our resources as if this land was empty and had no owners, just as it did in 1948.”

“It is also unleashing the hand of the army and terrorist settlers who are killing our Palestinian people in broad daylight, stealing their land and water, burning and demolishing their homes, and forcing them to pay the price for the demolition or forcing them to demolish it with their own hands and uproot their trees.”

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Moreover, he stated: “The Israeli government allowed the formation of racist Jewish terrorist organisations that practice terrorism against our people, and provided them with protection as they attack the Palestinians and call for the expulsion from their homes.”

The most prominent of such terrorist organisations, Abbas said: “Are the Hilltop Youth, the price tag groups, Lahava and the Temple Mount Trustees.” He pointed out: “These terrorist organisations are led by MKs, and, in this context, we call on the international community to put these terrorist organisations on the lists of global terrorism.”

“Israel has left us nothing of our land to establish our independent state in light of its frenzied settlement expansion, so how will our people live in freedom and dignity? Where will we establish our independent state to live in peace with our neighbours? The number of settlers now is 751,000, making up 25 per cent of the total population in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

Regarding the impunity of the Israeli occupation, Abbas denounced: “Israel kills our people without accountability, as it did with Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by an Israeli sniper. Shireen has dual Palestinian-American citizenship. I challenge the US to prosecute those who killed her.”