Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday denounced United States President Donald Trump’s peace initiatives for West Asia as the “slap of the century”. Abbas said that the Palestinian Authority would not accept Trump as a mediator for talks with Israel, AFP reported.
“We said no to Trump. We will not accept your project,” the Palestinian Authority president said at a meeting of the Palestinian Central Council in Ramallah, which was called to discuss Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. The Palestinian Central Council is a high-ranking arm of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Trump has appointed lawyer David Friedman as the US ambassador to Israel, and Nikki Haley as the envoy to the United Nations, individuals Abbas described as a “disgrace”.
After Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel, the Palestinian Authority has refused to meet US officials. “Politically, Jerusalem is our capital. In our religion, it is our capital. Geographically, it is our capital,” Abbas said on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported. “But it was removed from the map with a tweet from Trump.”
Abbas also said that the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements signed between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, were effectively finished, AFP reported. “I am saying that Oslo, there is no Oslo. Israel ended Oslo,” he said.
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