Palestinian President Wants Intensified Popular Resistance

Date: 19 August 2018 - 21:30

News ID: ۵۶۴۷۸

WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Palestinian president has called on Palestinians to intensify their "popular resistance" against the Zionist regime’s occupation.
Palestinians need to "keep the ground aflame with popular resistance” against the Zionist regime and not "underestimate the importance” of resistance, Mahmoud Abbas told the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Ramallah.
Abbas called the U.S. administration a "partner of the Israeli occupation" regime and reaffirming opposition to President Donald Trump's "deal of the century" which he has yet to unveil.
Abbas, who reportedly once proposed a land swap ceding 6.5 percent of the occupied territories to the occupying regime, has derided the plan as "the slap of the century” and said he will not commit "treason” by agreeing to it.
He has been boycotting the U.S. administration since Trump’s decision in December 2017 to recognize al-Quds as the Zionist regime’s "capital” and move the American embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv.
"The U.S. administration is a partner of the Israeli occupation government. It is part of the problem, and not part of the solution,” the PLO council said.
The Palestinians, the council said, will continue with their policy of suspending political relations with the U.S. until it backtracks on its "illegal decisions” regarding al-Quds, refugees and settlements.
Washington has spent the past eight months dragging its feet on publishing the document and while Trump’s officials have given away nothing publicly, analysts believe the plan is already being implementing by the Zionist regime entrenching the "apartheid” rule over Palestinians.
Trump’s team is reportedly seeking a face-saving alternative location to a future Palestinian "capital”, with Abu Dis 4 km east of al-Quds and cut off from the city by the regime’s wall being proposed as the candidate.
The Palestinians are reportedly facing huge pressure to give in to the plan.
The Trump administration has already cut funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, which cares for more than two million refugees in the occupied territories. It is also poised to pull more than $200 million of funding to the Palestinian Authority this summer.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during a news conference following the extraordinary meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, Turkey.