CAIRO – The Palestinian Authority has cut all ties with the US and Israel, including security cooperation, after rejecting a highly controversial Middle East peace plan presented by Donald Trump.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas made the announcement Saturday in Cairo where he addressed the Arab League, which backed the Palestinians.
“We are informing you that there will be no relations with you (Israel) and the United States, including on security cooperation,” Abbas said at an extraordinary meeting of the pan-Arab bloc in Cairo.
He said the move followed the “disavowal of signed agreements and international legitimacy” by the US and Israel.
Israel will have to “bear responsibility as an occupying power” for the Palestinian territories and Palestinians will press ahead with resistance using peaceful means, he added.
The blueprint, endorsed by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calls for the creation of a demilitarised Palestinian state that would exclude Jewish settlements built in occupied territory and remain under near-total Israeli security control.
The blueprint also proposes US recognition of Israeli settlements on occupied West Bank land and of Jerusalem as Israel’s indivisible capital.
Israel and Palestinian Authority security forces have long cooperated in policing areas of the occupied West Bank that are under Palestinian control. The Palestinian Authority also has intelligence cooperation agreements with the CIA, which continued even after the Palestinians began boycotting Trump’s peace efforts in 2017.
In Cairo, the Arab League rejected Trump’s plan, saying in a statement it failed to meet “the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people.” Arab leaders also vowed “not to… cooperate with the U.S. administration to implement this plan.”
The ministers affirmed Palestinian rights to create a state based on land captured and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, with East Jerusalem as capital, the final communique said.
They insisted on a two-state solution that includes a Palestinian state based on borders before the 1967 Six-Day War — when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip — and with east Jerusalem as its capital.
Foreign ministers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, three close US allies, as well as Iraq, Lebanon and others, said there could be no peace without recognising Palestinian rights to establish a state within the pre-1967 territories.
