Another rig is in: Palestinian Authority urges US to reinstate Abbas’s visa before UNGA

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman says US visa revocations 'will only increase tension and escalation' [File: Zain Jaafar/AFP]

Aug. 30, 2025- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s office has urged the United States to reverse a decision to revoke the Palestinian leader’s visa, just weeks before he was set to attend the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

The Palestinian presidency expressed “astonishment” at Washington’s decision on Friday to rescind the visas for Abbas and 80 other Palestinian officials before next month’s high-level meetings at UN headquarters.

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, a US-based think tank, accused the Trump administration is “clearly violating diplomatic protocol” in its decision to revoke the visas. As a host state, the US is meant to grant visas to UN member-state representatives and officials to visit the international body’s headquarters in New York City. “What’s going on here is clearly ideologically driven,” Duss told Al Jazeera. “There are people inside the Trump administration who are working closely with the right-wing Israeli government and their goal is to simply remove the Palestinian liberation movement from the international agenda,” he said.

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