Alexandra Sharp
Foreign Policy / September 25, 2025
‘Palestine is ours’
In a video address, Mahmoud Abbas called on more nations to recognize an independent Palestine.
Foreign leader after foreign leader has taken the podium at the United Nations General Assembly this week to condemn Israel’s war in Gaza and endorse an independent Palestinian state. On Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas championed that call.
“There can be no justice if Palestine is not free,” Abbas said in a prerecorded video address, having been barred from attending the high-level meetings in person after the Trump administration revoked the Palestinian leader’s visa. “[W]e are ready to work” toward a peace plan that would end the Israel-Hamas war and begin reconstruction in Gaza, he added. “Palestine is ours.”
That plan refers to a Sept. 22 proposal that would establish a state of Palestine within the region’s 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Hamas and its allies would not be granted a place in governance and would have to hand over their weapons.
“We do not want an armed state,” Abbas reiterated in his Thursday speech. Instead, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, would take over leadership of Gaza—a move that many foreign powers have supported due to the PA’s recent reform efforts.
In several instances on Thursday, Abbas denounced antisemitism; condemned Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel; called for Hamas to release the hostages and for Israel to release imprisoned Palestinians; and backed Israel’s right to exist. Referring to the Oct. 7 attack, Abbas declared: “These actions do not represent the Palestinian people nor do they represent their just struggle for freedom and independence.”
At the same time, Abbas accused Israel of carrying out a “war of genocide, destruction, starvation, and displacement” in Gaza that disproportionately has killed and wounded unarmed Palestinian women, children, and older adults. His remarks came as Israeli forces advanced deeper into Gaza City on Thursday, killing at least 19 people across the territory in what Israel says is part of an ongoing operation to target “terrorist infrastructure” embedded in the populated area.
“What Israel is carrying out is not merely an aggression,” Abbas said. “It is a war crime and a crime against humanity that is both documented and monitored, and it will be recorded in history books and the pages of international conscience as one of the most horrific chapters of humanitarian tragedy in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Abbas also condemned Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem while denouncing settler violence against Palestinians there in addition to warning against the continued blocking of humanitarian aid entering Gaza and criticizing Israel’s strike on Hamas leadership in Qatar.
Echoing Abbas’s message, several nations (largely led by France) have used this week’s U.N. summit to recognize an independent Palestinian state. However, Israel and its closest ally, the United States, remain opposed to such actions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to address this diplomatic pressure during his U.N. address in New York City on Friday.
Alexandra Sharp is the World Brief writer at Foreign Policy
