Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, delivering prerecorded remarks from his office in Ramallah after the United States denied him and other top Palestinian officials visas to attend the gathering for the second year in a row.
“The Palestinian people face one of the most dangerous times in its history,” Abbas said, citing long-term military occupation in the West Bank and the war in Gaza. Israel, he said, “has
targeted all of the basic necessities of life.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak in person early in the afternoon. As Abbas spoke, the Israeli delegations' seats in the General Assembly hall sat vacant.
In his speech, Abbas once again implored the international community to take more vigorous action and speak out more loudly against Israel.
“How much longer will some states continue to remain silent against Israel or supply it with the weapons it uses against our people? The world has witnessed the tremendous cost in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” Abbas said. He added: “What is the international community waiting for in order to protect the Palestinian people?”
Though negotiations have not taken place for years, Abbas urged the international community to push for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.
The international community has backed Trump’s plan for a group of apolitical administrators to govern Gaza under the Board of Peace. But Abbas said the territory could not remain politically separate from the West Bank and East Jerusalem for the long term.
He said the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank needed to be governed by “one state, one government, one law and one legitimate entity authorized to bear arms.”
Since 2005, the now-90-year-old Abbas has led the Palestinian Authority, which is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people. But his support among Palestinians has withered during years of corruption and the sometimes violent advance of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Under Abbas, Palestine has been recognized as a country by a majority of U.N. member states. But on the ground in the West Bank, the mostly symbolic moves have not affected Israel’s decades long military occupation. Throughout the war in Gaza, Abbas and the authority have been largely sidelined from negotiations over its future in favor of a transition process shepherded by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
The Palestinian Authority was created under a series of peace agreements with Israel in the 1990s and administers semiautonomous areas of the West Bank, while relying heavily on foreign aid. It is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people.
It was ousted from Gaza after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 and violently seized control. Abbas was elected to what was supposed to be a four-year term in 2005. The authority has not held presidential or legislative elections since 2006.
Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and much of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Abbas recorded the video on Wednesday.
