Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has begun addressing the UNGA. He is speaking via a videolink, as the Trump administration denied him and his delegation visas.
With renewed calls for an independent Palestinian state taking centre stage this week, Abbas’s speech is one of the most anticipated.
“I speak to you today after almost two years in which our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have been facing a war of genocide, destruction, starvation and displacement,” Abbas has said via video link, Al Jazeera reported.
That genocide has been “waged by the Israeli occupation forces in which they killed and injured more than 220,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are unarmed, children, women and the elderly.”
“What Israel is carrying out is not merely an aggression. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity that is both documented and monitored, and it will be recorded in history books and the pages of international conscience as one of the most horrific chapters of humanitarian tragedy in the 20th and 21st centuries,” he said.
After outlining the situation in Gaza, Abbas turned to the West Bank, where “the extremist Israeli government continues to implement its settlement disease through illegal settlement expansion and developing projects for annexing settlements”.
He points to Israel’s latest E1 settlement plan, “which would divide the West Bank into two parts and would isolate occupied Jerusalem from its surroundings and would undermine the option of the two-state solution, in a blatant violation of international law and relevant Security Council resolutions”.
The Palestinian Authority leader has said “we reject and completely deplore” calls by Netanyahu for a “greater Israel”.
That involves “expanding into sovereign Arab states, in addition to the brutal attack against the sisterly State of Qatar,” he said.
He called the attack an escalation and “a grave and a blatant violation of international law”.
Referring to the increasing “terrorism” of settlers, he said, “They burn homes and fields, they uproot trees and attack villages and attack unarmed Palestinian civilians."
“In fact, they kill them in broad daylight under the protection of the Israeli occupation army.”
Abbas then addressed the attacks on Islamic and Christian religious sites in al-Quds, Hebron and the Gaza Strip, saying they have damaged mosques, churches and cemeteries “in a blatant violation of the historic status quo and in a clear violation of the provisions of international law”.
Abbas highlighted “seven million Palestinians are still living the tragedies of the Nakba and displacement since 1948”.
“Our people in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip, are still living the tragedies of the Israeli aggression and occupation for decades,” he said.
“Years that our people have spent under occupation, killing, arrests and settlement and the theft of money, property and lands, and this still continues without any deterrent or accountability,” he said.
“More than a thousand resolutions at the United Nations, not one of them was implemented,” he said. “There have been many efforts, many international initiatives, without reaching an end to this tragic situation that the Palestinian people are living under the yoke of occupation.”
He added that Palestinian authorities have adhered to the 1993 Oslo Accords. “We restructured our institutions, and we amended our national charter, and we rejected violence and terrorism and we adopted a culture of peace,” he said. “We made all our efforts to build the institutions of a modern Palestinian state that lives side by side in peace and security with Israel, but Israel did not adhere to signed agreements and has worked systematically on undermining them.”
Abbas has concluded his address with a message to Palestinians “in the homeland, in the exile and in the diaspora”.
“No matter how much our wounds bleed, and no matter how long this suffering lasts, it will not break our will to live and survive,” he said.
"The dawn of freedom will emerge, and the flag of Palestine will fly high in our skies as a symbol of dignity, steadfastness and being free from the yoke of occupation. Palestine is ours. Jerusalem is the jewel of our heart and our eternal capital. We will not leave our homeland,” he said.
“We will not leave our lands. Our people will remain rooted like the olive trees. Firm as the rocks we will rise from under the rubble to rebuild and to send from our blessed and holy land the messages of hope and the sound of truth and right and build the bridges of just peace for the people of our region and the entire world,” he said.
MNA/
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