Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas has said that Hamas “must hand over its weapons” and called for deploying peacekeepers to Gaza ahead of a summit on Palestinian statehood, France said on Tuesday.
In a letter delivered on Monday to French President Emmanuel Macron and to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, co-chairs of the U.N. summit to take place on June 16-18, Abbas made some “unprecedented” promises, the Élysée Palace claimed, without elaborating further on those pledges.
“Hamas will no longer rule Gaza, and must hand over its weapons and military capabilities to the Palestinian [Authority] Security Forces,” Abbas wrote in the missive, according to the France 24 outlet.
Abbas reportedly also wrote that Ramallah was “ready to invite Arab and international forces to be deployed as part of a stabilization/protection mission with a [U.N.] Security Council mandate.”
The 89-year-old leader, who is serving the 21st year of his first four-year term, was said to have reiterated his commitment to long-promised administrative reforms, writing he intends to hold presidential and general elections “within a year” under international auspices.
In the letter, Abbas condemned the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 men, women and children were slaughtered, and more than 250 others were dragged back as hostages into the Gaza Strip, as “unacceptable,” according to some French media reports on Tuesday.
On Sunday, Palestinian Media Watch urged Paris and Riyadh to cancel the conference until Abbas publicly denounced the events of Oct. 7.
“As Western leaders plan to meet at the U.N. on June 17 to give P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas a present of recognition of a Palestinian state, Abbas continues to prove how unworthy the P.A. is of being a state,” the Israel-based organization said in a statement on Sunday.
PMW noted that on June 1, the official P.A. daily, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, published an interview with Abbas from August, in which he declared that Hamas had achieved “important goals” with the Oct. 7 onslaught.
According to Abbas, the worst single-day massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust “shook the foundations of the Israeli entity” and “exposed the claims” that the IDF is “invincible.”
The publication of Abbas’s comments came only three months after Mahmoud al-Habbash, Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs, praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as “legitimate resistance,” PMW said.
Responding to the announcement from the Élysée on Tuesday afternoon, PMW tweeted: “Two-faced Abbas strikes again.”
“It took Abbas 20 months to figure out that Oct. 7 rape, beheading, torture and murder of 1,200 is merely ‘unacceptable.’ What’s truly unacceptable is thinking that Oct. 7-defender Mahmoud Abbas has a gram of decency in him,” the NGO exclaimed in the social media post.
‘A bilateral matter between states’
The upcoming conference, sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia, is set to focus on determining steps toward recognition of a Palestinian state.
The goal signals a retreat from the summit’s earlier ambition of seeing a large bloc of countries, including France and the United Kingdom, recognize a Palestinian state, The Guardian reported on Saturday.
Macron claimed that recognizing “Palestine” was “not only a moral duty but a political necessity,” speaking during a press conference on May 30.
However, Anne-Claire Legendre, his adviser for North Africa and the Middle East, and Romaric Roignan, director for the region at the French Foreign Ministry, told Ynet that the recognition would not be unilateral.
“Recognition of a Palestinian state remains on the table, but not as a product of the conference. It will remain a bilateral matter between states,” they said.
Instead, it will be tied to certain conditions, including a truce in Gaza, the release of hostages, reform of the P.A., economic recovery and an end to Hamas’s terrorist rule in the Strip, per The Guardian.