FM Sa’ar blasts Abbas’ UN speech on Gaza, PA rule: ‘Israel won’t be deceived again’

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar derides Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ virtual speech at the UN General Assembly — in which Abbas asserted the PA’s readiness to take over Gaza and vowed Palestinians would “not leave [their] land” — claiming that the Palestinian leader has failed to combat terrorism and declaring that “Israel will not be deceived” by his words.

Sa’ar dismisses Abbas’s expressed intent in the speech for the Palestinian Authority to govern a postwar Gaza that offers no role to Hamas, writing in a post on X that Abbas “said that he is ready to receive the Gaza Strip, which he so easily lost to Hamas in 2007. How nice of him.”

Sa’ar accuses Abbas of failing to “fight terrorism”, despite this being “the commitment on which the Palestinian Authority was founded.”

“To the West, he sells fine words. But his own people are meant to draw conclusions from the key he wears on his suit lapel,” Sa’ar adds, calling the pin “the symbol for flooding Israel with the descendants of those Arabs who left in 1948 — and for its destruction.”

“Israel will not be deceived once again,” warns Sa’ar.

Sa’ar reiterates criticism from the Foreign Ministry earlier this week, which also pointed to Abbas’s pin when he addressed a UN conference by video on Monday.

Descendants of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during Israel’s 1947-1949 War of Independence sometimes wear or display keys as a symbol of their yearning to return to those homes, with the so-called right of return once seen as a major sticking point in long-moribund efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation.

Israel argues that allowing Palestinians to “return” to what is now Israel would result in an influx of millions that would threaten Israel’s character as a majority Jewish state, and demands that the children and grandchildren of those who left should not be recognized as refugees.