Mahmoud Abbas

Latest news on Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), as well as the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the leader of the Fatah party.

He was born in 1935 in Safed, Palestine (now in Israel), and fled with his family to Syria during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He studied law at the University of Damascus and later obtained a doctorate in history from Moscow.

Mahmoud Abbas joined Fatah in 1961 and became one of the key members of the Palestinian armed struggle against Israel. He also played a major role in negotiating peace agreements with Israel, such as the Oslo Accords in 1993, which granted the Palestinians limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Abbas was elected as the first prime minister of the PNA in 2003, but resigned after a few months due to disagreements with Yasser Arafat, the then president of the PNA and the PLO. After Arafat’s death in 2004, Abbas succeeded him as the president of both entities, as well as the president of the State of Palestine, which was declared by the PLO in 1988 and recognized by more than 130 countries.

Abbas has been seeking international recognition and support for the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations, as well as pursuing a two-state solution with Israel based on the 1967 borders. He has also faced challenges from Hamas, the Islamist rival of Fatah that controls Gaza, and from internal divisions within his own party.

In 2023, he has been condemned by the US, the EU, Israel, and Germany for his remarks on the Holocaust, in which he suggested that Jews were persecuted by Nazi Germany because of their "social role" as money lenders, not because they were Jewish. He also repeated a discredited theory that European or Ashkenazi Jews were not Semites, but descendants of a Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism. He has been accused of spreading "pure antisemitism" and "historical distortions" that are "inflammatory, deeply offensive, and serve no one's interests". He has not apologised for his statements yet.