Kuwait blocks UN statement criticising Palestine’s Abbas
Kuwait blocked the UN Security Council on Friday from issuing a US-sponsored statement criticising Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for “vile anti-Semitic slurs and baseless conspiracy theories”.
Kuwait is the Arab representative on the 15-member council and two diplomats said it opposed the statement on grounds that it was not comprehensive.
Mr Abbas issued an apology earlier on Friday over remarks in his speech on Monday to the Palestine Liberation Organisation parliament, which was sharply condemned as anti-Semitic by Israel, the US, UN, EU and others.
He said it was the Jews’ “social function”, including money lending, which caused animosity toward them in Europe. He also described the creation of Israel as a European colonial project, saying: “History tells us there is no basis for the Jewish homeland.”
US ambassador Nikki Haley was sharply critical of the Security Council’s failure to respond. “Disgusting anti-Semitic statements from the Palestinian leadership obviously undermine the prospects for Middle East peace,” she said.
The statement would have expressed the Security Council’s “firm and unequivocal rejection of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial” and called on Mr Abbas “to refrain from anti-Semitic comments”.
The US circulated the statement on Friday as several thousand Palestinians staged a sixth weekly protest on the border between Gaza and Israel.
The protests every Friday are part of a campaign organised by Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
They are aimed at breaking a decade-old blockade of the territory, which was imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas took control there in 2007, and at 70 years of Israeli occupation of land the Palestinians want as their state.
Since late March, 40 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,700 wounded by Israeli army fire.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said in a letter to the Security Council and Secretary General Antonio Guterres late on Friday that more casualties in the protests reinforce the “sense of despair and anger” at “this ruthless occupation”.