As the U.S. moves closer to fulfilling its threat to withhold tens of millions of dollars from a U.N. refugee aid agency in order to pressure Palestinians back to peace talks, an indignant Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, blasted U.S. President Donald Trump in a fiery speech on Sunday and sent this message to his administration: “Damn your money!”
“We can say ‘no’ to anyone if things are related to our fate and our people, and now we have said ‘no’ to Trump. We told him the deal of the century was the slap of the century. But we will slap back.”
—Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority
Abbas has said that Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli captial—which was widely rebuked by the international community—destroyed his administration’s credibility to serve as a lead mediator in future negotiations to resolve the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Shame on you,” Abbas fumed, noting that Trump’s promised peace deal has not materialized or resulted in talks with Israel. “He said, ‘I will give you a peace deal.’ The deal turned out to be a mess. He said, ‘We will not pay for the Palestinians because they stopped the negotiations.’ Where are the negotiations?”
“We will not accept for the U.S. to be a mediator, because after what they have done to us—a believer shall not be stung twice in the same place,” Abbas said Sunday at the opening of a two-day gathering of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council.
“We can say ‘no’ to anyone if things are related to our fate and our people, and now we have said ‘no’ to Trump,” Abbas added. “We told him the deal of the century was the slap of the century. But we will slap back.”
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