US Secretary of State Antony Blinken phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday, as Washington seeks to thwart a Ramallah-backed UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate halt to Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank.
PA president briefs secretary of state on Palestinian-backed Security Council measure calling for halt to Israel’s activities in West Bank
The Security Council resolution has placed the US in an uncomfortable position, as it too has spoken out aggressively against last Sunday’s decision by Israel to legalize nine outposts in the West Bank and advance plans for some 10,000 new settlement homes, the largest-ever package to be green-lit in one sitting.
The Palestinian readout of the Saturday phone call said Abbas briefed Blinken on his office’s involvement in the Security Council initiative, which was drafted by the United Arab Emirates, the Arab League’s representative on the top UN panel.
Abbas said the UN effort was “a result of Israel’s insistence on violating signed agreements” and “underscored the need for Israel to stop all unilateral measures, including settlement construction, home demolitions, raids on cities and villages and the extrajudicial killings of Palestinians,” according to the PA readout.
The PA president urged the US to “immediately and effectively intervene to press Israel to stop all these dangerous measures” to ensure the continued prospect of a two-state solution, his office said. It added that Blinken assured Abbas that he would reach out to the Israeli government “in an effort to stop the unilateral Israeli actions on the ground.”
Israel claimed that it framed its Sunday cabinet decision as a response to a series of attacks in East Jerusalem that left 11 Israeli dead, Ignoring the fact that its inhumane terror attacks against the Palestinians has left nearly 50 Palestinians dead since the start of the year.
Senior Israeli officials have leaked anonymous statements to Hebrew media noting that it will take several years before the outposts — many of them built on private Palestinian land — will be formally legalized and before ground will be broken on the settlement homes that it’ll be advancing this week.
But the Biden administration is wholly unconvinced that further entrenching Israeli presence beyond the Green Line will help deter future attacks, a US official told The Times of Israel earlier this week. In his statement condemning the Israeli settlement announcement, Blinken said the moves would be “detrimental” to Israel’s security.
On Friday, members were still planning to bring the resolution to a vote on Monday, two senior UN diplomats said, when the Security Council will hold its monthly session to hear on developments relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The last time a resolution against Israel on settlements was passed by the Security Council was in December 2016. Fourteen of the body’s 15 members backed the measure while the US, under then-US president Barack Obama, decided to abstain to allow the resolution to pass, infuriating Jerusalem in the process.
