UNITED NATIONS: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will address the UN General Assembly virtually on Thursday, as the United States weighs whether to intervene in Israel’s push to annex the occupied West Bank.
The 89-year-old leader speaks just days after several European countries formally recognised a Palestinian state — a move rejected by Washington, which has barred Abbas and senior Palestinian officials from attending the gathering in person.
The General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to allow Abbas to deliver his speech via video message, despite strong Israeli and US opposition. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to block any path to Palestinian statehood, while members of his far-right cabinet are openly calling for annexation of West Bank territory.
Arab News reported that 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.”
Abbas, whose Fatah party remains in rivalry with Hamas, has condemned the group’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and has again demanded Hamas lay down its arms to the Palestinian Authority. Arab News said European governments, while maintaining ties with Abbas, are also pressing for major reforms within the Authority.
Meanwhile, the war in Gaza continues to exact a devastating toll. The enclave’s health authorities and independent sources now estimate that more than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians — including women, children, the elderly, and displaced families. Entire households have been wiped out in recent air strikes; in az-Zawayda, at least 11 members of a single family were killed when their home was destroyed, with bodies left under the rubble.
Humanitarian conditions are described as catastrophic. Hospitals have been reduced to ruins, water and electricity systems have collapsed, and famine looms in northern Gaza.
