Abbas at UN: ‘Do not allow Palestinian homes to be burned while residents sleep’

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN General Assembly on Thursday that Palestinians would not leave their homeland or accept forced displacement, while reiterating his support for a negotiated peace based on a two-state solution.

In a recorded address to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Abbas said Palestinians would not allow others to determine their political future and called for international action to protect Palestinian communities.

“We will not remain waiting, nor will we accept what the governments of the Israeli occupation state decide for us,” Abbas said, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA. “No lasting security can be built upon the occupation of another people and the denial of their legitimate rights.”

Abbas said the Palestinian leadership’s political program was based on preventing displacement, preserving the territorial unity of Palestinian lands, renewing Palestinian institutions through democratic means and exercising the right to self-determination.

He reiterated his call for an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel, and for a resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue based on UN resolutions, including General Assembly Resolution 194.

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Abbas said Palestinians did not want another diplomatic process focused on indefinitely managing the conflict while conditions on the ground continued to change.

“We want a process that ends the occupation and guarantees freedom and self-determination for Palestinians, and security and peace for Israelis and the countries of the region,” he said.

He described the Palestinian vision as one in which Palestinians remain on their land and determine their own future, with a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. Such an agreement, he said, could provide the basis for wider regional cooperation, economic development and security.

Abbas also warned that Palestinians were facing what he described as one of the most consequential periods in their history, arguing that current developments threatened not only prospects for a two-state solution but Palestinian communities themselves.

His appeal came amid continuing Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, as well as the consequences of the war in Gaza.

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