Abbas: ‘Our mission is to save Jerusalem’; Official PA newspaper lays claim to Israeli cities as being Palestinian

(Times of Israel) Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party staged a massive rally Friday in the Gaza Strip, the first such gathering in the territory since Hamas seized control there in 2007 and a reflection of the warming ties between the two rival factions.

In a speech from his Ramallah headquarters in the West Bank, Abbas declared that “victory is near… We will soon meet in Gaza.”

He named a list of Palestinians killed in decades of struggle against Israel — including those from rival Palestinian movements, such as Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He said that when Fatah was founded, the Palestinians’ situation was far worse than today. “The world didn’t recognize us. We didn’t have a state or an entity on the political map,” he said. “We were regarded as refugees who needed charity.” But “a trailblazing force” had insistently sought to change that, a process that culminated at the UN, he said, when the General Assembly on November 29 upgraded the Palestinians’ status.

Protesting the “occupation and blockade” imposed by Israel, and the expansion of settlements in Jerusalem, Abbas declared, “Our mission is to unify our efforts to save Jerusalem our capital.”

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(PMW) In its weekly crossword puzzle, the Palestinian Authority official daily presented the southern Israeli city of Be'er Sheva as a "Palestinian city":

Clue: "A southern Palestinian city"
Solution: "Be'er Sheva"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 26, 2012]

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