Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will visit Russia

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will visit Russia in the near future. Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters about this. “I can’t give an exact date yet, but it is planned in the fairly near future, the parties have reached agreements [относительно визита]. All that remains is to agree on a specific date, but it will be quickly agreed upon,” Ushakov said. According to him, this will happen before the end of the year.

On October 11, presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that Abbas’s visit was being prepared and information would be available in a timely manner. On October 9, Palestinian Ambassador to Russia Abdel Hafez Nofal spoke about preparations for Abbas’s visit to Moscow, also without specifying the date.

At the end of September, even before the start of hostilities by the Palestinian group Hamas in Israel, the head of the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, Riyad al-Maliki, said that Abbas planned to visit Russia before the end of the year, in particular, negotiations were planned with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

In July, Putin had a telephone conversation with Abbas. Then the Palestinian president expressed support for the actions of the Russian leadership. Putin, in turn, confirmed Moscow’s position, which advocates a fair and sustainable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

On October 10, the presidents of Russia and Turkey, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had a telephone conversation, during which discussed the situation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone. The leaders of the two countries expressed deep concern about the escalation of violence and the catastrophic increase in the number of civilian casualties. A long-term peaceful settlement of this crisis, Putin and Erdogan believe, is possible only on the basis of a “two-state” formula approved by the UN Security Council, which provides for the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with its capital in East Jerusalem.

The Russian president previously called the worsening situation in the Middle East a clear example of the failure of US policy in this region. In his assessment, Washington’s actions did not take into account the “core interests” of the Palestinian people and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.

On October 7, the radical group Hamas began military operations against Israel. The militants attacked army border units and entered Israeli populated areas, where they captured an unknown number of hostages, both military and civilian. In response, the Israeli army launched Operation Iron Swords, and the government declared the country was going into a state of war. According to the latest data, more than 2,000 people have died as a result of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In particular, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 1,050 people were killed, and more than 5,000 were injured. On the Israeli side, more than 1,200 people were killed and over 3,400 more were injured.