Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday through prerecorded remarks from his office in Ramallah after the United States denied visas to him and other senior Palestinian officials to attend the gathering in person for the second consecutive year.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to address the assembly in person later on Thursday.Abbas, now 90, has led the Palestinian authority since 2005.The authority is the internationally recognised representative of the Palestinian people, but Abbas’s support among Palestinians has declined amid years of criticism over corruption and the sometimes violent expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.Under Abbas, Palestine has been recognised as a state by a majority of UN member states.However, those largely symbolic diplomatic gains have not changed Israel’s decades-long military occupation of the West Bank.The Palestinian authority has also remained largely sidelined from negotiations over Gaza’s future during the ongoing war, with a transition process instead being shepherded by US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.The Palestinian authority was established under a series of peace agreements with Israel in the 1990s and administers limited self-governing areas of the West Bank. It relies heavily on foreign aid and has not held presidential or legislative elections since 2006.The authority was ousted from Gaza after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 and subsequently seized control of the territory in a violent takeover.Abbas was elected president in 2005 for what was intended to be a four-year term.Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem during the 1967 war.Palestinians seek both territories as part of a future independent state, while Palestinians and much of the international community consider Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank illegal and an obstacle to establishing a viable and contiguous Palestinian state.
