GAZA CITY, 10 May 2006 — Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh both urged the Middle East diplomatic quartet yesterday to rethink its suspension of direct aid to the government. “Western and Arab donors should realize that the Palestinian people are suffering hardships and the international community, which believes in liberty, justice and human rights, should not be prepared to accept such a situation,” Abbas told reporters at his West Bank headquarters.
“We have formulated propositions so that aid can reach the Palestinian people ... to allow us to confront the needs of everyday life,” he added. Abbas’ comments come ahead of a meeting of the quartet — which comprises Russia, the United States, European Union and United Nations — in New York later yesterday to confer on the increasingly dim prospects for implementing an internationally-backed Middle East peace plan known as the road map. Both the EU and US, the two biggest donors to the Palestinian Authority, have frozen direct aid to the Authority since Haniyeh’s Islamist movement Hamas took control of the government in March. Speaking to reporters in Gaza City, Haniyeh said that aid payments needed to resume and urged the quartet not to bow to US pressure.
“Today, I am sending an urgent message to the quartet: it should rethink its precipitous decisions which have imposed a siege against our people,” he said. The quartet “should resist the political authoritarianism and pressure which the Americans are practicing throughout the whole world,” he added. Although Hamas appears on an EU and US terror blacklist, its leaders have been visitors to Moscow since their dramatic triumph in Palestinian elections in January.
In a speech, Haniyeh said in Gaza he had asked Fatah and Hamas leaders “to put an end to these sad events” and keep gunmen under control. Abbas, in his letter to the quartet, also asked the forum to continue to base Middle East peace-making on the road map it sponsored. The plan charts reciprocal steps leading to a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Abbas told the peace brokers he rejected “unilateral moves,” a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to set Israel’s borders by 2010 with or without Palestinian agreement.
