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Palestinian UN Ambassador Drops Bid for VP of General Assembly Following US Threats
“A Palestinian vice presidency at the General Assembly would not change power realities on the ground, but it would normalize Palestinian statehood claims... That is precisely what the United States is attempting to block.”
May 22, 2026
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations withdrew his bid to become a vice president of the UN General Assembly on Thursday following threats from the Trump administration to strip the visas of the entire Palestinian delegation, according to NPR.
The Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, has been an outspoken critic of Israel's actions toward Palestinians, particularly since the beginning of the genocidal war in Gaza, which he said has entailed "the collective punishment of over two million Palestinians."
He has been Palestine’s permanent UN observer for more than two decades and had earlier this year planned to run for president of the General Assembly, though he bowed out following US pressure.
The Guardian reported that on Tuesday, the US State Department sent a diplomatic cable to the US embassy in Jerusalem instructing it to pressure the Palestinian Authority (PA)—the governing body of the occupied West Bank—to withdraw its bid for one of the 21 vice presidencies of the General Assembly as well.
General Assembly vice presidents have a role in setting the body’s agenda and filling in when the president is absent. The UN is scheduled to hold elections amongst Assembly members on June 2.
The US cable said Mansour “has a history of accusing Israel of genocide"—as leading human rights groups and experts have—and that his presence would “undermine” the objectives of President Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” in Gaza, which a recent Human Rights Watch report said has fallen fall short of its promises to provide aid to Palestinians and has allowed Israeli forces to continue killing them with little pushback despite a ceasefire.
The cable said, “We will hold the PA responsible if the Palestinian delegation does not withdraw its [vice presidential] candidacy” by Friday, “and consequences will follow.”
The cable threatened to revoke the US visas of all Palestinian officials. The US already revoked most of them back in August, but rolled back the ban on those who were visiting as part of the annual UN summit. “It would be unfortunate to have to revisit any available options,” the cable said.
It also threatened that Israel would continue to withhold tax revenue that it owes to the Palestinian Authority, which was blocked by Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, at the beginning of the war in October 2023. The money being withheld by Israel accounts for 60% of the PA's revenue.
A person familiar with the matter told NPR that Mansour specifically would refrain from running for the position for the next two years, which was interpreted as a reference to the end of Trump's term as president.
The US is prohibited from blocking UN officials from visiting the body's New York headquarters under a 1947 agreement. However, the US has blocked visas for officials from enemy countries, including Russia and Iran, as well as the former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat.
Hady Amr, who served as a senior State Department official on Palestinian affairs under the Obama and Biden administrations, told NPR that expelling diplomats is extremely rare outside of "extreme situations like Russian espionage or election interference."
Amr said, "Generally, it's counterproductive because you need diplomats to work out problems between countries, and by expelling diplomats, you're undermining not only their ability to solve problems, but the abilities of the United States as well."
Tawfiq Al-Ghussein, a London-based researcher who specializes in modern Middle Eastern history and the displacement of Palestinians, said on social media that "the significance of this is not merely procedural."
"Washington is effectively trying to prevent even symbolic Palestinian institutional visibility within the UN system because it understands that international legitimacy matters politically, legally, and diplomatically," Al-Ghussein said. "A Palestinian vice presidency at the General Assembly would not change power realities on the ground, but it would normalize Palestinian statehood claims within the architecture of international governance itself. That is precisely what the United States is attempting to block."
“The irony is extraordinary: The same power that lectures the world endlessly about democracy and international order is reportedly threatening visas and diplomatic consequences to stop Palestinians from holding a largely ceremonial UN role,” he continued. "It reveals once again that the issue was never 'peace negotiations' as such, but control over who is permitted institutional legitimacy in the international system."
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200+ Luminaries Back Demand for Israel to Free Marwan Barghouti
The Israelis want the Palestinian leadership weak and divided, and they have succeeded in arranging for this outcome.
Dec 03, 2025
Two hundred prominent literary, cultural and political figures have signed an open letter demanding the release from Israeli prison of Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti 66, is widely thought to be one of the few figures who could unite the Palestinians and lead them to statehood. Israel has imprisoned him for 23 years after a trial most observers consider extremely flawed to say the least. Israel is apparently preparing to go on an execution spree against Palestinian prisoners, some of whom are held without charges or trial for indefinite periods of time.
The star-studded list of signatories includes Margaret Atwood of “The Handmaid’s Tale” fame; Mark Ruffalo a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk, Philip Pullman, author of “His Dark Materials;” Paul Simon, who knows a thing or two about bridges over troubled waters; Benedict Cumberbatch a.k.a. Dr. Strange; Sting, who knows when someone’s watching you; artist Ai Weiwei (who was once arrested and held without charges for 81 days himself); television personality and author Stephen Fry; billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson; and other prominent writers and culture figures.
The campaign is being likened to the effort to free Nelson Mandela from the prisons of Apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s, which presaged the end of Apartheid itself.
Palestinian leadership is a mess, though this is largely the fault of Israel and the United States. Occupied people are often divided and ruled by outsiders, who bribe and spy and set honey traps. They turn any successful indigenous leader into either a collaborator or a terrorist. They damage the local economy and so set the stage for societal failure. The Oslo Accords of 1993 turned the Palestine Liberation Organization, which gave up its chief bargaining chip by recognizing Israel, into a tool for policing Palestinians to keep them from rising up over being brutally occupied. As a result, the PLO is now widely hated. Not to mention that the Israeli refusal to allow elections to be held after 2006 has ensured that the Palestine Authority leaders became a corrupt gerontocracy.
Hamas was alternatively bankrolled by the Israelis or at their behest and cooped up in a large open air concentration camp, a combination that made them dangerous rather than complacent and as a result they committed the horrors of October 7, 2023, ensuring that no Israeli or American government could deal with them ever after.
The Israelis want the Palestinian leadership weak and divided, and they have succeeded in arranging for this outcome.
Bargouti has none of the taint of corruption and collaborator status that now clings to the PLO, since although he is a member of Fateh he has been in prison for the bad old days. He has from his youth been opposed to Hamas.
Barghouti was born in 1959 in the hamlet of Kober in Ramallah governorate. His wife Nadwa is an attorney and women’s rights activist.
Barghouti in his teens joined the Communist Party and participated in peaceful demonstrations. As historian Joel Beinin showed in his Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Eqypt and Israel 1948-1965, the Communist Party was one of the few political vehicles in Israel and Palestine that had both Israeli and Palestinian members, since Marxism rejects nationalist chauvinism.
The Israeli-Palestine problem, however, did not seem to him likely to be resolved by sitting around the campfire singing the Marxist equivalent of Kumbaya, and he gravitated to Fateh, the leading group within the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat. In 1978, the Israelis arrested Barghouti when he was around 19, apparently just for being associated with the PLO. They imprisoned him for four years. He finished up his high school degree at Prince Hassan High School in Bir Zeit by completing correspondence courses from prison.
After he was released in 1982, when he must have been about 23, he went to Bir Zeit University and did a BA in History and Political Science. Then he did an MA at Bir Zeit in International Relations. During the 1980s he was active in campus politics and was elected head of the Bir Zeit University student council.
In 1987, the Israelis expelled him to Jordan, which is a war crime. That is, an occupying power is forbidden in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 of displacing members of the occupied population. He had to remain in forced exile until 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO and the latter recognized Israel, ending the state of conflict between the two in principle.
On his return to his homeland, Barghouti landed a teaching position at the main Abu Dis campus of al-Quds University in Jerusalem. In the 1990s, Barghouti was known for having good relationships with Israelis. He rose to become secretary-general of Fateh in the Palestinian West Bank, and then was elected to the Palestinian parliament established after Oslo. He established the secular Tanzim paramilitary to combat rising fundamentalist Hamas militants. He was seen as a young comer in Palestinian politics, as someone on whom the old guard like Yasser Arafat depended. But he was also critical of the corruption that arose in the Palestine Authority.
But during the Second Uprising (Intifada), the relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians again turned violent. In 2002, Barghouti wrote an op ed for the Washington Post entitled “Want Security? End the Occupation.” He said,
- “Over the past 15 months, Israel has killed more than 900 Palestinian civilians, 25 percent of them under the age of 18.”
He added,
- “I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated — the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else. This principle may well lead to my assassination.”
Thereafter, a militant Fateh wing committed violence in Israel, killing dozens of Israelis and the Israeli authorities tagged Barghouti as involved, though they never made public what evidence they had of his involvement. In 2004 he was sentenced to five life sentences.
I am a severe critic of terrorism in the sense of targeting civilians for political purposes. But in the real world of politics, people who deploy that tactic sometimes do have a political comeback. Menahem Begin, who boasted of machine-gunning down innocent Palestinian women and children at Deir Yassin in 1948, became prime minister of Israel and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ahmed al-Shara, formerly head of an al-Qaeda offshoot, who was imprisoned by US marines in Iraq, and who certainly committed a ton more terrorism than Begin, was just recently an honored guest in the Trump White House. Nelson Mandela himself committed political violence in his youth, for which he was imprisoned; he was no pacifist. Released from prison, he became president of South Africa and urged reconciliation.
In prison Barghouti finished a doctorate in political science in 2010 and is known for having argued for restraint and against violence to his Palestinian audience on the outside.
His advice to the Israelis in 2002, which, to say the least they haven’t heeded, is still the best advice. If you want security, end the occupation. If Barghouti could help do that, it might save Israel from its own most self-destructive instincts — which are at the moment sinking it.
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UN Condemns 'Brazen' Israeli Killing of Surrendering Palestinians in West Bank
A UN official decried the incident as "yet another apparent summary execution" by Israeli forces.
Nov 28, 2025
The United Nations on Friday accused Israeli security forces of carrying out a "brazen" killing of two Palestinian men who were seen surrendering in video footage.
The footage, which was first aired by the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and reposted on X by Drop Site, shows two Palestinian men exiting with their hands raised from a building in the West Bank city of Jenin that had been surrounded by Israeli forces.
The two men then crawled out of the building entrance and knelt down with their hands still raised before apparently being instructed by Israeli forces to go back toward the entrance of the building. The two men did so, and were then shot dead by at least one Israeli officer.
🚨 Watch: Footage from Palestine National TV shows Israeli soldiers executing two detained Palestinians in cold blood during a raid in Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank today.
Their hands were raised, they posed no threat, and Israeli soldiers murdered them anyway. https://t.co/9JA9eisaK4 pic.twitter.com/8v0sv1kdBF
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) November 27, 2025
According to France 24, United Nations rights office spokesman Jeremy Laurence told reporters on Friday that the incident was "yet another apparent summary execution" by Israeli forces.
"We are appalled at the brazen killing by Israeli border police yesterday of two Palestinian men in Jenin," he emphasized.
Laurence added that UN rights chief Volker Turk was demanding "independent, prompt, and effective investigations into the killings of Palestinians," and for those involved in the killings to "be held fully to account."
The Palestinian Authority, which identified the two men killed by Israeli officers as 37-year-old Yussef Ali Asa'sa and 26-year-old Al-Muntasir Billah Mahmud Abdullah, accused Israeli forces of carrying out "brutal" executions that amounted to a "war crime."
In a joint statement, Israeli police and the military said that the "incident is under review by the commanders on the ground, and will be transferred to the relevant professional bodies," and they claimed that the two men killed were "wanted individuals who had carried out terror activities, including hurling explosives and firing at security forces."
Despite pledges for a review of the incident, BBC reports that Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has already given a thumbs-up to officers' actions and he responded to footage of the incident by saying, "Terrorists must die."
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