NEW YORK — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza as well as “what Hamas carried out on the seventh of October,” while declaring that Palestinians will defiantly remain on their lands, during his virtual speech at the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

In his address to the 80th session of the assembly, Abbas, 89, said the war has killed and wounded roughly 220,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom he said are women, children and the elderly, relying on figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. Hamas says some 66,000 have been killed. Israel says it has killed some 22,000 gunmen.

He highlighted Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, including the recent approval of the E1 settlement project, which aims to forestall efforts to establish a viable, contiguous Palestinian state, as well as unchecked settler violence.

“They burn homes and fields, they uproot trees and attack villages and attack unarmed Palestinian civilians. In fact, they kill them in broad daylight under the protection of the Israeli occupation army,” Abbas, who is one of the only world leaders authorized to speak virtually, said.

The US issued a visa ban on dozens of top PA officials in response to the decisions by Western countries to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.

“Despite all that our people have suffered, we reject what Hamas carried out on the seventh of October. These actions that targeted Israeli civilians and took them hostage… do not represent the Palestinian people, nor do they represent their just struggle for freedom and independence,” Abbas said, in a slightly more detailed condemnation than the ones he has issued in the past, including at a Monday two-state solution conference.

The first condemnation came in June, over a year and a half after Hamas-led terrorists murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages from southern communities, sparking the ongoing war.

Abbas insisted Thursday the PA is ready “to bear full responsibility for governance and security” in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas “will not have a role to play.”

The PA has been eager to replace Hamas in Gaza, but Israel has rejected the idea outright, while the US and the Arab world have maintained that Ramallah must undergo significant reforms until it can be better suited for the role and that a transitional body of independent Palestinian technocrats........

© The Times of Israel