Washington again denies Mahmoud Abbas a visa for UNGA week

The United States has denied Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an entry visa for next week’s UN General Assembly high-level week, the second year in a row. The State Department statement on 16 September did not name him. Officials and sources who know the file confirmed that he and his travelling delegation are covered.

The department said the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization had again failed to meet commitments made to Washington. It listed actions at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, efforts to win unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, stipend payments to prisoners convicted of attacks on Israelis, and the treatment of those attacks in official statements and school textbooks. As a result, it said, visa sanctions on PLO members and PA officials would be extended under standing US law.

A waiver remains in place for staff already accredited to the Palestinian Mission at the United Nations in New York. Those diplomats can still work the building. The ban is on the Ramallah leadership flying in.

The Headquarters Agreement problem

Under the UN Headquarters Agreement the host country is required to allow access for people travelling to the United Nations. Washington has long argued that it can still refuse visas on security, extremism and foreign-policy grounds. Last year Abbas addressed the Assembly by video after the same refusal. A representative for his office called that decision a contradiction of international law and of the Headquarters Agreement.

All 193 members of the Assembly were expected to vote on Thursday on whether he may speak by video again this year. That vote is a procedural patch. It does not put him in the hall. It decides whether the hall will listen to a feed from Ramallah.

Abbas has used the September podium for years as the main annual platform of the Palestinian Authority. Denying him the room two years running changes the texture of high-level week. Other leaders will still walk the corridors. He will not.

What the State Department is punishing

The department’s list is specific. It objects to PA and PLO support for cases against Israel in The Hague. It objects to campaigns for recognition that bypass bilateral talks. It objects to the prisoner stipend system, which Israel and the United States call pay-for-slay and which the Authority describes as social support for families. It objects to how attacks are described in Palestinian public language and in textbooks.

Those are policy disagreements that have sat in the bilateral file for more than a decade. What changed in 2025, and again in 2026, is the remedy. Instead of a demarche, Washington is using the visa stamp. Eighty Palestinian officials were denied visas for the 2025 gathering. This year the department has repeated the same instrument and kept the mission waiver so that the UN seat itself does not go dark.

What follows in New York

High-level week will still contain Palestine as a subject. The Gaza war, the Iran war and the Lebanon file are all on the same calendar. Guterres has already said the Security Council is paralysed by law-breaking powers. A host-country visa refusal against a non-member observer’s president will be read in that light by governments that already think the UN system is being edited from Washington.

It will also be read in Ramallah as a message about the Authority’s remaining value to the United States. Abbas is 90. The succession fight inside Fatah is not a secret. Keeping him off the floor of the Assembly does not resolve that fight. It does remove the one week in the year when the PA president stands in the same room as the people who write the resolutions.

The practical question for next week is narrow. Will the Assembly accept a video? If it does, Abbas speaks from a distance. If it does not, the Palestinian item proceeds without his voice. Either way, he will not clear immigration at JFK.