Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan the “slap of the century” as thousands of Palestinians held protests in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Islamist group Hamas said it would confront Trump’s “aggressive” proposals and accused him of talking “nonsense” about Jerusalem.
Confounding some predictions, Trump’s plan proposed a “two-state” solution to the decades-long conflict, which envisages Israel and a future Palestinian state living alongside each other, with conditions.
The plan would see a Palestinian state with its capital in “eastern Jerusalem”, though in an area cut off from much of the city by an Israeli military barrier.
Palestinians reject any proposal that would not see a Palestinian capital in all of East Jerusalem, which includes the walled Old City and numerous sites holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians.
Trump, in his remarks at the White House earlier on Tuesday, said that Jerusalem would remain the undivided capital of Israel.
“I say to Trump and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin)Netanyahu: Jerusalem is not for sale, all our rights are not for sale and are not for bargain. And your deal, the conspiracy, will not pass,” Abbas said in a televised address in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Abbas said it was “impossible for any Palestinian, Arab, Muslim or Christian child to accept” a state without Jerusalem. Israel captured the eastern part of the city along with the West Bank and Gaza in a 1967 war.
Read the article in The Canberra Times and The Courier (AAP).