Palestinians Freeze All US Contacts

The Fellowship  |  November 21, 2017

Yesterday Stand for Israel reported to you Israel’s position on the resumption of peace talks between the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Now, The Times of Israel’s Dov Lieber reports that Palestinian leadership has also reacted, in an unsurprisingly bad manner – cutting off all contact with the U.S. because of threats to shutter the PLO offices in Washington, D.C.:

The Palestinians have frozen all contacts with the United States after it decided to close their representative office in Washington, officials said on Tuesday.

“In practice by closing the office they are freezing all meetings and we are making that official,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told AFP.

A spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization confirmed that it had received instructions from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “regarding closing down all communication lines with the Americans.”

The Palestinian move comes as the Trump administration seeks to broker the long-out-of-reach Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Speaking in the Spanish Parliament today, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinians were “committed to a historic peace deal [with Israel] under the auspices of President Trump.”

Over the weekend the US State Department informed Malki that the PLO office in DC would be closed because the Palestinians had violated a 2015 US Congressional mandate…