Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the United States for what he termed to be its continued support for Israel’s war on Gaza. He demanded the international community stop providing weapons to Israel.

This bloodshed cannot continue,” he said. All the world shares responsibility for what is being done to our people, he told the 193-member General Assembly on Thursday, his first visit to the chamber since Israel launched the onslaught last October in response to an attack by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group.

Abbas named Washington as one of those countries, pointing out that it continues to give political cover and weaponry to Israel even though the death toll in Gaza has mounted. Israeli attacks have killed at least 41,534 people in Gaza since October, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

At least 1,139 were confirmed dead in the assault on southern Israel by Hamas on October 7, while around 250 others were taken captive, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli statistics.

Abbas accused the US of enabling Israel’s assault to continue by repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.”We are sorry that the biggest democracy of the world, the United States, stymied three times draft resolutions of the Security Council demanding Israel to observe a ceasefire,” Abbas said. “The US alone stood and said, ‘No, the fighting is going to continue,”” he said.

For years, Washington has been a key Israeli ally and supplies it with billions of dollars worth of military aid annually. The US, along with Qatar and Egypt, has also been working in vain on efforts to broker a ceasefire to end the war and secure the release of dozens of hostages being held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.

Gaza proposal

Abbas also proposed a post-war 12-point plan for Gaza. He insists that Israel must withdraw completely from the Gaza Strip, and no portion of Gaza shall be made into a buffer zone or confiscated by Israel. He wants postwar Gaza to be ruled by the Palestinian Authority, which already manages parts of the West Bank, as part of a Palestinian state with an end that Israel rejected.

Abbas was to call for an international peace conference under the auspices of the UN within a year and repeated calls for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. “He made some strong points, criticised the United States directly, attacked Israel directly, and laid out some vision for the future,” said Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst.

Still, Bishara said Abbas has been “missing in action” for the last year. He said Israeli leaders “are not going to find a more moderate leader than Abbas, who accepts all their conditions. If they can’t make peace with him, they are not going to be able to make peace with any of his successors”.

Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, responded within minutes of Abbas’s speech, attacking it. “Abbas spoke for 26 minutes and did not say the word ‘Hamas’ once,” he said.”Only when he stands on the UN platform does he talk about a peaceful solution,” Danon said.