Erekat says ties with Israel will be cut "gradually"

Secretary General of the PLO Executive Committee, Dr. Saeb Erekat on Tuesday said that severing ties with Israel will be done gradually, according to a decision announced by the 30th PLO Central Council meeting in Ramallah on Monday.

According to WAFA News Agency, Erekat said that President Mahmoud Abbas is going to convene later in the afternoon a meeting of the Higher National Committee, which consists of members of the PLO Executive Committees and Fatah Central Committee as well as nationalist, security and government figures due to the seriousness of the situation and the need to act quickly to implement these decisions.

 He stressed that the Higher Committee will start implementing all these decisions gradually, “and there will be no jumping in the air because the issues are not slogans.”

Regarding intra-Palestinian reconciliation and ending the division, Erekat said that there is a Zionist American plot based on separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and Jerusalem in order to kill the Palestinian national project, which is the main point of the racist Israeli Nation-State law, as well as to kill the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 borders.

He said that the leadership seeks to preserve the Gaza Strip as a part of the Palestinian national territory and as an integral part of the territory of the occupied Palestinian state. However, the methods used by Hamas indicate that it is going towards separation.