Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the United States for its continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and urged the international community to stop supplying weapons to Israel.
“This madness cannot continue. The entire world is responsible for what is happening to our people,” he told the 193-member General Assembly on Thursday, in his first address to the chamber since Israel launched the assault last October in response to an attack by the Palestinian group Hamas.
Abbas singled out Washington, saying it continues to provide diplomatic cover and weapons to Israel despite the mounting death toll in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed at least 41,534 people since October, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
At least 1,139 people were killed in the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli statistics, and around 250 others were taken captive.
Abbas accused the US of allowing Israel’s assault to continue by repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“We regret that the United States, the largest democracy in the world, obstructed three times draft resolutions of the Security Council demanding Israel to observe a ceasefire,” Abbas said. “The US alone stood and said, ‘No, the fighting is going to continue,’” he said.
Washington is a key Israeli ally and supplies it with billions of dollars worth of military aid annually.
The US, along with Qatar and Egypt, has also been working unsuccessfully on efforts to broker a ceasefire to end the war and secure the release of dozens of hostages held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.
Gaza proposal
Abbas also laid out a 12-point proposal for Gaza after the war is over. He called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, without the establishment of buffer zones or the seizure of any part of Gaza. He said the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, should govern post-war Gaza as part of a Palestinian state, a vision that Israel rejects.
“We are not asking for more, but we will not accept any less,” Abbas said.
Abbas called for an international peace conference under the auspices of the UN within a year, and reiterated calls for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“He made some strong points, he criticised the United States directly, he certainly attacked Israel directly, he laid out some vision for the future,” said Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara.
However, Bishara said that Abbas has been “missing in action” in the past year. He said Israeli leaders were “not going to find a more moderate leader than Abbas, who accepts all their conditions. If they can’t make peace with him, they are not going to be able to make peace with any of his successors.”
Danny Danon, Israel’s UN ambassador, responded to Abbas’s speech within minutes with a critical assessment. “Abbas spoke for 26 minutes and did not say the word ‘Hamas’ once,” he said.
“Only when he stands on the UN platform does he talk about a peaceful solution,” Danon said.
