Blinken meets Abbas in Ramallah as part of his regional tour

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Mahmoud Abbas met this Sunday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, as part of the foreign minister’s third visit American in Palestine. region since the outbreak of war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel on October 7.

The meeting comes after Blinken met yesterday in Amman with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the PNA and last Friday he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv.

Blinken was received at the PNA 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 PNA’s de facto capital, 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 deemed “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable.”

“Arab countries demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to this war, the killing of innocent civilians and the destruction it causes, and we refuse to characterize it as self-defense,” the Jordanian minister said yesterday of Foreign Affairs Ayman al Safadi.

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 into the Palestinian enclave, where the there are already more than 9,500 deaths due to the offensive that took place. Israel It began after the Hamas attack which left more than 1,400 dead on Israeli soil. But Netanyahu rejected a possible temporary ceasefire in Gaza if the release of the 241 hostages taken by the Islamist group Hamas is not guaranteed, dampening US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s expectations to negotiate a humanitarian pause in the fights.