Abbas Calls for Sanctions against Israel at UN

November 7, 2024

by: JNS

Thursday, 7 November 2024 | Palestinian Authority [PA] chief Mahmoud Abbas demanded on Monday that the UN sanction Israel for alleged breaches of its charter and failure to implement resolutions, Ramallah’s Wafa news outlet reported.

Addressing the UN’s World Urban Forum in Cairo, Abbas said Israel should be penalized for what he called its “failure to fulfill its obligations upon gaining UN membership in 1949 and for not adhering to UN General Assembly [UNGA] resolutions 181 and 194,” according to the Wafa news report.

UNGA Resolution 181 was adopted in 1947 and called for the partition of the British Mandate into two states: one Jewish and one Arab. It was rejected by Palestinian and Arab nations, with the latter launching a war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish state.

Resolution 194 (1948), which is not legally binding, recommends that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

Abbas claimed that the “implementation of relevant UN resolutions, especially the recent UNGA decision on the International Court of Justice’s [ICJ] advisory opinion, along with granting Palestine full UN membership, are essential for achieving justice and stability.”

The PA chief’s remarks closely resembled those of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestinian rights whose anti-Jewish statements have been widely criticized, who told the Democracy Now outlet last week that Israel should be suspended from the world body due to Jerusalem’s alleged attempts to “erase Palestinianness.”

“There has been the violations of hundreds of resolutions by the—on Israel, over occupied Palestinian territory, by the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, and steady violation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, the Apartheid Convention, the Genocide Convention,” Albanese charged.

Last month, Abbas claimed that Israel is a “colonial project” that would be defeated if the US withdrew its support, the Jewish state’s Kan News public broadcaster reported, quoting Russian state-controlled media.

The Kan report cited an interview that aired on Russia-1 with Russia Today chief editor Margarita Simonyan, who met Abbas on the sidelines of the BRICS summit on October 22–24, held in Kazan in central Russia.

According to Simonyan, the Palestinian leader told her over coffee, “We have an issue with the US. They are the ones perpetrating everything. Who brought Zionism to this country? The colonizers.”

Officials of Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction sat down with Hamas terrorists in Cairo in recent days for talks on the establishment of a body to manage Gaza after the conclusion of Israel’s war against terror.

Last month, a PA official told Reuters that the terrorist groups were in negotiations to form a committee to run Gaza and manage its border crossings after talks for a unity government faltered. At the time, the committee’s form and duties remained unclear, the PA official said.

On September 25, PA Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa announced that Fatah had agreed to meet with Hamas in Cairo. Mustafa said the talks would focus on forging initial deals “to arrange the situation” in Gaza. He confirmed his “readiness to administer the Gaza Strip the day after the war,” the Ma’an News Agency reported, “without excluding anyone.”

Posted on November 7, 2024

Source: (This article was originally published by the Jewish News Syndicate on November 6, 2024. Time-related language has been modified to reflect our republication today. See original article at this link.)

Photo Credit: Loey Felipe/UN Photo/jns.org