Alwaght-Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas has blamed the Israeli regime for destroying the environment in Palestine.
Speaking in New York at the United Nations during a signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Abbas said, "The Israeli occupation is destroying the climate in Palestine, and the Israeli settlements are destroying the environment in Palestine."
"Please help us in putting an end to the occupation and to settlements," Abbas told the UN assembly on Friday. "It has become vital to change the international approach to dealing with the Palestinian cause,” he added.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in the United Nations headquarters in New York.
The agreement, approved by the 196 states party to the UN Framework Convention of the Climate Change during the COP21 conference in France in December, has countries pledge to work to limit the global temperature rise to no more than two degrees Celsius.
An estimated 171 countries were expected to sign the document on Friday, coinciding with Earth Day.
Abbas' presence at the signing ceremony had symbolic importance in the wake of Palestine's de facto recognition of statehood by the UN, which has considered Palestine a non-member observer state since 2012. Palestine's accession to the treaty could become a major headache for the US, which has a law forbidding funding for "any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood."
On Monday, a group of US senators sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry saying that Palestine's participation in the UN climate change secretariat and the Paris agreement would prohibit Washington from paying the $10 million annually into the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agency. Five years ago the US stopped funding UN's cultural agency UNESCO after it granted the Palestinians full membership.
