UN envoy: Abbas announcement 'a desperate cry for help'

UN Middle East envoy Nikolay Mladenov characterizes as a “desperate cry for help” PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s announcement last night that Ramallah is no longer beholden to signed agreements with the US and Israel because of the latter’s annexation plans.

“If I may speak openly and very frankly on the issue, whatever our individual assessments of the Palestinian reaction to the Israeli threat of annexation may be, it is certainly one thing – it is a desperate cry for help. It is a call for immediate action. It is a cry for help from a generation of a leadership that has invested its life in building institutions and preparing for statehood for over a quarter of a century,” Mladenov says during a Security Council briefing.