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HARDLINE zionists attacked Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today after he declared Israel in breach of existing peace deals.
In yesterday’s speech to the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s central committee meeting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank capital Ramallah, Mr Abbas called for all existing accords to be “revised” as Israel “has brought these agreements to a dead end.
“With regard to the [1993 and 1995] Oslo accords, Israel ended them after it reoccupied the West Bank and ceased its commitment to their terms,” he said.
He also urged the committee to rule out any role for the US as broker in talks to end the occupation after President Donald Trump’s recognition last month of Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its capital.
“We will not accept what the US is going to propose to us and will not accept its mediation after its Jerusalem crime,” he said.
“We will accept only international mediation in the peace process with a goal to end the occupation” under the auspices of the UN.
Palestine claims occupied East Jerusalem — home to the al-Aqsa mosque but increasingly under threat from illegal Israeli settlements that flout several UN resolutions — as the capital of a future independent state.
Mr Abbas did not spare the UN from criticism over its failure to enforce those resolutions against Israeli land theft.
Predicting a backlash from Israel and its Western allies, Mr Abbas warned: “We are going to take this decision even though we know in advance what it will bring to us.”
The meeting was attended by all Palestinian parties except Hamas, which reconciled with the ruling Fatah party last year, and Islamic Jihad. Both were invited but objected to the venue.
Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the extremist Yisrael Beiteinu party, said today Mr Abbas had “lost his mind” and given up on peace in favour of confrontation with Tel Aviv and Washington.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the hardline pro-settler Jewish Home Party, claimed Mr Abbas’s speech showed he was “at the end of his road, toward the end of his rule and the end of his life.
“There appears to be no Palestinian partner and it is unlikely there will be,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on a state visit to India today.
The PLO meeting continued. Mr Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the shift in US policy “requires a change in prevailing notions by some regarding the basic nature of the conflict with the Israeli occupation.”
He rejected “non-nationalist agendas” that fail to “serve the cause and national interest.”