President Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, foreground center, arrives for the talk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovf in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2014. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

(Agence France Presse) – RAMALLAH, West Bank: Palestinian officials said Sunday they had arrested a member of their peace negotiating department for spying for Israel, a development likely to deepen distrust between the sides at a time of deadlocked diplomacy and simmering street violence.

A Gaza mother and daughter at the Rafah border crossing. (Johnny Barber, PC, file) Courtesy Palestine Chronicle

 
Life in Gaza became impossible, to the extent that the UN Conference on Trade and Development released a report last September warning that Gaza could become ‘uninhabitable’ in less than five years, if current economic trends continue.

Smashing the Abbas icon of Palestinian non – violence would herald an end to his era, dooming for a long time to come any prospect for a negotiated peaceful solution.

 
 
By Nicola Nasser*

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.. (photo credit:AP)

Abbas is the darling of the West and of Israel, a trusted stooge and dogsbody. Hamas is usually blamed for any corruption. But if this catalogue of maladministration, malfeasance and worse doesn’t hammer the final nail in Abbas’s political coffin, I don’t know what will.

Due to the fact that the appointment of Malley coincided with the crisis in relations between the U.S. and Israel, caused by the recent speech made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the U.S. Congress behind Obama’s back and without his approval, analysts have begun to talk about “changes in the U.S. role in the Middle East”

 
 

 
Image above: Palestinian inmates stand together in a prison in the West Bank town of Jericho

 
Image above: Palestinian inmates stand together in a prison in the West Bank town of Jericho

The antics of BICOM and its subsidiary Fathom look suspiciously like a clumsy attempt to rejig the Israeli occupation narrative by putting words into the mouth of the ambassador and driving a wedge between him and his boss, President Abbas.

 According to the Israeli organisation Peace Now, while “talking peace” for the last nine months, Israel issued permits to build 14,000 new “Jewish only” homes in the occupied land violating article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention

P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas signed a  Fatah-Hamas Unity Agreement that would lead to a unity government within five weeks.