Will The Real Mahmoud Abbas Please Stand UP?!!!

"Despite all that our people have suffered, we reject what Hamas carried out on October 7."

"[The targeting and hostage taking of Israeli citizens does] not represent the Palestinian people [nor] their just struggle for freedom and independence."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas   

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly via video at United Nations headquarters, September 25, 2025. (AP/Angelina Katsanis)

 

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lost little time in responding to the 20-point journey to end the conflict in Gaza occasioned by the 7 October 2023 incursion into Israel by thousands of Palestinian terrorists and civilians orchestrated by Hamas on a mission to slaughter Israeli civilians, rape Israeli girls and women, dismember their victims in an orgy of sadistic pleasure, and take children, the elderly, women and Israeli soldiers captive as hostages into Gaza. Hamas and the PA [PLO/Fatah] have always been political rivals, the former leading a secular authority, the latter committed to an Islamist state.

 

When the 20-point plan was released, PA President Abbas announced he was prepared to be enlisted within the plan to provide "a modern and democratic state that abides by international law, the rule of law and multilateralism and the peaceful transition of power". The Palestinian Authority under his rule was prepared to work the U.S. and assigned partners in the implementation of the peace plan; he is "ready to bear full responsibility for governance and security" in the absence of Hamas.

 

With the support of the peace plan behind him, the man promising a democratic government who has himself ruled the West Bank after an initial election two decades earlier that was never again brought to the polls, assured his Western contacts that his preparedness is there, and Hamas must hand over its weapons to the Palestinian National Authority. The messages he sends expressed in Arabic to an Arab audience fail to quite match the statements of commitment to peace and good order and rejection of violence that the UN heard from him.  

"On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a sudden attack ... killed 1,200 Israelis, abducted 250 others, and took them as hostages."

"This attack shook the foundations of the Israeli entity."

"[The attacks that day] exposed the [false] claims that ... [Israel] has an invincible army." 

Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa (C-L) listens as Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty (C) speaks at a press conference on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing in Rafah on August 18, 2025. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP

 

After the butchery of October 7, 2023, when Israelis were reeling in disbelief and sorrow, Mahmoud Abbas eventually, after a five-day hiatus expressed his sentiments on the massacre during a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan while in Amman, stating: "We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides", handily glossing over his leading role in producing school curricula for Palestinian children that characterize Jews and Israelis as loathsome colonialists stealing Palestinian land, urging children to contemplate the glory of martyrdom in defiance of Israeli 'oppression', as a cruel 'occupier'.

 

When speaking in June to the PA's daily paper Al-Hayat Al Jadida, Mr. Abbas outright applauded the October 7 massacre for "achieving important goals", attracting the attention of Palestinian Media Watch for translation to English as he celebrated the strategic achievement that Hamas achieved that day. On the other hand in a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman he wrote: "What Hamas did on October 2023 in killing and taking civilians hostage is unacceptable and condemnable and Hamas must immediately release all hostages". 

"As important as the goals that Hamas attempted to achieve through this attack may have been, they are not comparable to the damages and heavy losses that the Gaza Strip residents ... have suffered."

Mahmoud Abbas 

This handout picture provided by the Palestinian Authority’s press office shows Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas applauding as he gives a video address to a UN summit on a two-state solution in New York City, from his headquarters in Ramallah on September 22, 2025. (Thaer GHANAIM / PPO / AFP)

"They [Palestinian leaders] wanted peace. They wanted a state. They wanted self-rule. In fact they got self-rule."

"But this Hamas terrorist organization, which believed, one, that Israel can't exist at all, and there's no compromise, and that, two, Palestine must be an Islamist state, not a secular state. They set about destroying any hopes for that."

"If you're dealing with the same parties and the same actors and the same agendas, then you're likely going to have the same outcome."

"If Hamas is allowed to exist, how then does the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian government succeed in administering its population?"

"Hamas is not going to bow down to that easily. They never have. It is for Hamas, total victory or death."

Terrorism expert Lara Burns, former FBI agent