(AFP) – Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas will address the United Nations by video on Thursday as the United States, despite its opposition to him, weighs whether to try to stop Israeli annexation of the West Bank. The veteran 89-year-old Palestinian Authority president will address the UN General Assembly three days after France led a special summit in which a slew of Western nations recognized a state of Palestine.
US President Donald Trump’s administration adamantly rejected statehood and, in a highly unusual step, barred Abbas and his senior aides from traveling to New York for the annual gathering of world leaders. The General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to let Abbas address the world body with a video message. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to allow a Palestinian state, and far-right members of his cabinet have threatened to annex the West Bank in a bid to kill any prospect of true independence. He said in a statement on Wednesday that the recognition of the State of Palestine by Western countries “does not obligate Israel in any way,” reiterating that “there will be no Palestinian state.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, despite his disagreements with Trump on statehood, said Wednesday that the US leader joined him in opposing annexation. “What President Trump told me yesterday was that the Europeans and Americans have the same position,” Macron said in an interview jointly with France 24 and Radio France Internationale. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golfing friend turned roving global negotiator, said that Trump in a separate meeting with a group of leaders of Arab and Islamic nations presented a 21-point plan for ending the war. “I think it addresses Israeli concerns as well as the concerns of all the neighbors in the region,” he told the Concordia summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. “We’re hopeful, and I might say even confident, that in the coming days we’ll be able to announce some sort of breakthrough.” A White House official told AFP that Trump wants to bring the conflict “to an expeditious close” and that foreign partners from the meeting “expressed the hope that they could work together with Special Envoy Witkoff to consider the President’s plan.”
Macron said that the US proposal incorporates core elements of a French plan including disarmament of Hamas and the dispatch of an international stabilization force. A French position paper seen by AFP calls for the gradual transfer of security control in Gaza to a reformed Palestinian Authority once a ceasefire is in place. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, one of the leaders who met jointly with Trump, said that the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country was willing to offer at least 20,000 troops.
Abbas’s Palestinian Authority enjoys limited control over parts of the West Bank under agreements reached through the Oslo peace accords that started in 1993. Abbas’s Fatah is the rival of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, although Netanyahu’s government has sought to conflate the two. Abbas in his address on Monday condemned the massive October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israel, which has responded with a relentless military offensive. He also called on Hamas to disarm to the Palestinian Authority. France and other European powers, while not joining Israeli and US efforts to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority, have said that it needs major reforms. Netanyahu will address the UN General Assembly on Friday.
bur-sct-dk-jgc/dhw/fox – Shaun TANDON
© 2024 AFP
