RAMALLAH, June 28, 2018 (WAFA) - Commenting on news that the United States intends to freeze its financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said on Thursday that Palestine is not for sale.

He told Voice of Palestine radio that the United States has not only frozen financial aid to the Palestinian Authority in order to get it to abandon its struggle for independence and freedom, but it has also abandoned all international norms and traditions and took measures that have isolated it internationally which made it not qualified to sponsor any peace negotiations.

Erekat stressed that talk about a humanitarian solution, such as the one the US is proposing for Gaza, while ignoring a political solution and the separation of the West Bank from the Gaza Strip are a result of the continuation of the intra-Palestinian division. He said that it is time to end the abominable Hamas coup of July 2007 and achieve political partnership among the Palestinian factions, mainly Fatah and Hamas, in order to defeat the American-Israeli scheme to liquidate the Palestinian cause.

He added that any attempt to trade humanitarian and financial rights to national rights is doomed to failure.

The PLO official said that the US wants the so-called deal of the century to tell the world that realism requires changing all references for the  political solution to the Palestinian issue, in addition to turning the negotiations into Israeli dictates, which is rejected by the world at large.

On Britain’s Prince William‘s visit to the Palestinian territories on Wednesday, Erekat said that the visit was very important.

He said the message conveyed by Prince William stressed that his country seeks to achieve the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital to live in peace alongside Israel.

M.K.