Blinken meets with Abbas in Ramallah as part of his tour of the region
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas, met this Sunday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, as part of the third visit of the head of US diplomacy to the region since the outbreak of the war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel on October 7.
The meeting takes place after Blinken met yesterday in Amman with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the ANP and last Friday he met in Tel Aviv with the Israeli prime minister. , Benjamin Netanyahu.
Blinken was received at the ANP headquarters by Hussein al-Sheikh, secretary of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and a close ally of Abbas.
The visit to the de facto capital of the ANP, Blinken’s first since the start of the war, comes a day after Arab ministers pressured him for the United States to facilitate an “immediate cessation” of the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian enclave. However, Blinken insisted on “Israel’s right to self-defense,” which his counterparts considered “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable.”
“The Arab countries ask for an immediate ceasefire and to stop this war and the murder of innocent civilians and the destruction it causes and we refuse to classify it as self-defense,” said Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al Safadi yesterday.
Blinken arrived in Israel on Friday with the intention of achieving a temporary ceasefire in the Gaza Strip that would allow the departure of foreigners and the entry of more humanitarian aid to the Palestinian enclave, where there are already more than 9,500 dead due to the offensive that Israel It began after the Hamas attack that left more than 1,400 dead on Israeli soil. But Netanyahu rejected an eventual temporary ceasefire in Gaza if the release of the 241 hostages taken by the Islamist group Hamas is not guaranteed, cooling the expectations of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to negotiate a humanitarian pause in the fighting.