UN General Assembly 2025: On day three, Palestinian leader speaks with Gaza in spotlight
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was one of the first leaders to address the UN General Assembly on Thursday. He spoke via video call as a result of the Trump administration banning him from entering the US.
Abbas barely mentioned the decision to bar him from the assembly, and instead said the Palestinian Authority (PA) was ready to implement a Gaza plan discussed by US President Donald Trump and Arab and Muslim leaders.
Abbas said the PA would work with international peacekeepers in Gaza and reiterated his demand that Hamas submit to the PA.
“I speak to you today after almost two years of which our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have been facing a war of genocide, destruction, starvation and displacement,” Abbas said.
“What Israel is carrying out is not merely an aggression. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity that... will be recorded in history books… as one of the most horrific chapters of humanitarian tragedy," he added.
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The PA’s seat of power is the occupied West Bank. Israel has rapidly been expanding settlements and threatening a full-scale annexation there, while the Israeli military supports settler attacks on Palestinians.
“The terrorism of settlers increases,” Abbas said, adding that “the extremist Israeli government continues to implement its settlement policies through illegal settlement expansion”.
Yemen says 'Palestinian wound bleeds'
Rashad al-Alimi, the chairman of Yemen’s presidential leadership council, spent much of his time at the podium addressing the unresolved Yemeni Civil War.
Although fighting in Yemen stopped in 2022, the country is divided, with the internationally recognised Yemeni Republic governing a small swath of southern and central Yemen and the Houthis controlling the capital Sanaa and most of northern Yemen. The territory is home to almost 80 percent of Yemen’s population.
Alimi thanked Saudi Arabia and the UAE for supporting his government, then briefly addressed Palestine, which he called a “a wound that continues to bleed”.
“Yemen and Gaza… are the moral testing ground of this important organisation,” he said.
Alimi called Palestine the “central cause of the Arab people”, which is witnessing an “important transformation for the overwhelming recognition of a Palestinian state".
Alimi thanked Saudi Arabia and France for hosting the UN conference on Palestinian recognition and expressed “full support for the Palestinian Authority”.
The Houthis have garnered broader support and recognition in the Arab and Muslim world for their military actions that they say are a response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Houthis have targeted international shipping in the Red Sea and Israel itself.
Alimi accused “outside militias” of using the Palestinian issue as a “trading card”.
Bosnia draws parallels between Yugoslavia atrocities and Gaza genocide
The chairman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zeljko Komsic, said Israel was taking a “genocidal approach” to occupy the Gaza Strip and drive the Palestinians out.
Addressing the General Assembly, Komsic leaned on Bosnia’s own history of genocide during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He noted the Srebrenica massacre, in which at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serbian Army.
Komsic said that “several elements of genocide” were being waged by Israel in Gaza.
“In addition to the fact that genocide represents the physical liquidation or removal of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group from a certain territory, it can also be committed in the event that such difficult living conditions are consciously imposed on that same [group] that threaten to ultimately destroy [it],” he said.
Komsic said Israel was attempting to occupy the Gaza Strip through an “aggressive genocidal approach”, and accused some world leaders of refusing to condemn Israel’s actions.
“A part of the world’s political public closes its eyes and keeps silent about this extremely terrible fact,” he said.
EU condemns starvation as weapon of war in Gaza
Antonio Costa, President of the European Union Council, framed Israel's war in Gaza and other conflicts as indicative of the collapse of the "multilateral" system.
“The world faces a crucial choice: Do you want a rules based international order that upholds multilateralism and [the] UN charter or a chaotic world based on unilateralism, violence and disruption," he said, adding that wars in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza were examples of the collapse of the former.
Costa said Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing “unimaginable suffering; children starving, families shattered, a humanitarian catastrophe that shocks the world’s conscience."
“The use of starvation as a weapon of war is immoral and one that defies words,” Costa said.
He condemned the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel, but said that Palestinians and Israelis have the “same right” to security.
“We are the largest provider of humanitarian aid to Palestinians…We have been, over the years, the largest supporter of the Palestinian Authority," he said, adding that the EU was opposed to all illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Costa said the EU supported the summit on Palestinian statehood hosted by France and Saudi Arabia at the UN earlier this week, but said “We alone cannot stop this humanitarian catastrophe," implying that other powers had leverage to end the war.
Costa called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the unconditional release of all Israeli captives, and the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid into the enclave.
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