Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas gathered his top diplomats in Istanbul on Saturday, rallying them on their quest for statehood as he accused Israel of forcing them to take the campaign to the UN. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been on hold for 10 months, shortly after Washington relaunched the first direct negotiations between the two sides for nearly two years.
And Abbas told the Istanbul meeting of Palestinian diplomats from around the world that the bid for UN membership was forced upon them by Israel’s refusal to halt settlement building and end its occupation. “We are going to the United Nations because we are forced to, it is not a unilateral action,” he told the gathering attended by Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“What is unilateral is Israeli settlement,” Abbas said at the meeting organised to finalise Palestinian strategy ahead of the UN General Assembly in September. “We have not been able to return to negotiations with (Israeli PM Benjamin) Netanyahu because of his refusal to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders and to stop settlement.”
