PALESTINIAN President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN General Assembly yesterday that Israel was waging ‘a genocidal war’ on Gaza.
He spoke by pre-recorded video after Washington refused him a visa for the second year running.
‘We reject these unlawful, punitive measures and we reject the accusations and justifications on which they were based,’ he said.
He called the exclusion of the Palestinian delegation ‘a violation of the United States’ obligations as the host country’.
‘In the Gaza Strip, our people are being subjected at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces to killing, destruction, starvation, and attempts at displacement,’ Abbas said.
In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, he condemned settler ‘terrorism’ carried out ‘under the protection of the occupying forces’.
He also denounced a ‘system of laws, measures and practices all built on racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing and state terrorism’.
‘How much longer will some states continue to remain silent on Israel or supply it with the weapons that it uses against our people?’ he asked.
Abbas called on Trump to honour the commitments he made to Arab and Islamic leaders last September ‘to prevent the annexation of Palestinian land and to reject displacement’. He urged faster implementation of the second phase of the Gaza deal.
Abbas reiterated the urgency for a Palestinian state with ‘Jerusalem as its capital’. Repeating the phrase for emphasis, he said Palestinians sought ‘a non-militarised state’ that ‘lives in security and peace alongside the state of Israel’.
The US State Department rejected the visa applications of Abbas and dozens of other Palestinian officials last week.
The General Assembly then voted 152 to three, with four abstentions, to let him speak by video.
The US, Israel and Paraguay voted against.
On Wednesday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the assembly that Spain condemns ‘unequivocally a genocide that Netanyahu is still perpetrating in Gaza’.
He cited Spain’s arms embargo on Israel and called for the Security Council’s permanent members to lose their veto.
Opening the debate on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres described ‘an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General’.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned Israel’s ‘genocidal mentality’, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Netanyahu’s government of genocide.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces elections on 27th October, also addressed the assembly yesterday on a one-day trip to New York.
Last year, 77 delegations were absent or walked out as he spoke.
