PA’s Abbas tells UN Israel trying to force Palestinians out, accuses it of ‘genocidal war,’ ‘settler terrorism’

NEW YORK — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accuses Israel of launching a “genocidal war” against Palestinians in Gaza, and of protecting “settler terrorism” in the West Bank, where his body is based.

He says Israel hopes to “forcibly drive” Palestinians out of their land.

While Abbas has previously condemned Hamas’s October 7 onslaught that sparked the war three years ago, he has made no mention of the terror group in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

He also calls out Israeli policies in the West Bank where “settlement expansion is accelerating, the West Bank is being fragmented… and settler terrorism is escalating under the protection of the occupation forces.”

“The theft of land, home demolitions, checkpoints and raids continue amid a system of laws, measures and practices based on racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing and state terrorism,” Abbas claims.

He also laments that “Jerusalem is being isolated and Judaized,” an apparent reference to the growth of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which Israel considers part of its undivided capital but Palestinians widely see as the capital of a future state.

“The danger is no longer limited to undermining the two-state solution and preventing the realization of a Palestinian state. It now threatens the very life and existence of the Palestinian people on their homeland,” Abbas says, accusing Israel of advancing “a malicious colonial plan whose goal is to make Palestinian life more difficult on their homeland and forcibly drive them to leave it.”

“Do not allow another Nakba and massacres like those that took place in 1948,” he tells UN members, referencing the year of Israel’s War of Independence and using a term referring to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the war.