Palestinian Media Watch urged France and Saudi Arabia on Sunday to cancel their summit on Palestinian statehood until Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas publicly denounces the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
“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 Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, published an interview that Abbas gave in August, in which the octogenarian leader said that Hamas achieved “important goals” when it murdered some 1,200 people, primarily civilians, on Oct. 7.
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 cross-border terrorist attack “exposed the glaring failure of this entity’s components, especially the army and the various security forces,” said Abbas, noting that Israel failed “to discover what Hamas was planning, and failed to block the attack and prevent heavy losses.”
The publication of Abbas’s comments came 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.
“What Hamas carried out on Oct. 7, I start from the assumption that resistance is legitimate. We agreed from the start that the resistance is legitimate, and no one can dispute the legitimacy of the resistance,” al-Habbash stated. “What happened on Oct. 7 is a legitimate thing, OK? It’s legitimate.”
PMW on Sunday called on Paris and Riyadh to demand that Abbas “retract this statement and publicly condemn the Oct. 7 massacre in Arabic on official P.A. TV, in the official P.A. daily, through the official P.A. news agency WAFA, and in mainstream and popular Arabic media.
“Abbas’s interview and his adviser’s recent defense of Oct. 7 must serve as a wake-up call for all Western countries that plan to attend the U.N. event later this month,” according to the Israeli NGO. “To his people in Arabic, Mahmoud Abbas remains a terror-supporting leader. When he meets world leaders, he continues his years of deception.”
The June 16-18 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.
French President Emmanuel Macron claimed that recognizing “Palestine” was “not only a moral duty but a political necessity,” speaking during a press conference in Singapore 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.
Recognition instead 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.