Washington lets Pezeshkian into UN week and keeps Abbas on a video link

The United States will let Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi attend next week's United Nations General Assembly in New York, the State Department said, seven months into a war between the two countries. The same week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will speak by video after Washington denied him a visa for the second year running.

A department spokesman put the Iran decision in host-country language. "Consistent with our host country obligations, the core delegation from the Iranian regime will be able to attend UN General Assembly High Level Week." Officials familiar with the visas, speaking without names because of privacy rules, confirmed that Pezeshkian and Araghchi are on the list with essential staff.

The delegation will be smaller than last year's. It will face travel limits inside New York and a ban on buying luxury and certain other goods. Those curbs began in 2025, when Iranian officials were barred from wholesale clubs such as Costco and Sam's Club and confined to routes needed to reach UN headquarters. Spokesman Tommy Pigott accused visiting Iranian officials of planning shopping trips while households in Iran face shortages.

The Abbas vote

The General Assembly voted to let Abbas address the debate by video and to allow senior Palestinian officials to join UN meetings remotely for the next year if they cannot travel to the United States. The tally was 152 in favour, three against and four abstentions. The no votes came from the United States, Israel and Paraguay. Colombia, Honduras, Panama and Peru abstained.

U.S. deputy envoy Tammy Bruce told the hall that the Palestinian Authority must "stop subsidizing terror and stop using diplomatic theater as a substitute for serious governance" if it wants to be treated as a partner. The State Department's public case for the visa ban cites Palestinian efforts to take the conflict to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, campaigns for unilateral recognition of statehood, and what it calls glorification of attacks in official statements and school textbooks.

Abbas had asked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to intervene with President Donald Trump after it became clear the visa would again be refused. The appeal did not change the outcome. Last year the same sequence produced a video address. This year the Assembly wrote the remote option into a resolution that covers the next twelve months, not only the September debate.

What the calendar now holds

The general debate opens on Tuesday with Trump scheduled to speak. Pezeshkian is listed for Wednesday. Trump has told interviewers he faces a "big decision" on whether to resume large-scale attacks on Iran. He has not said whether that decision comes before or after the November midterms. CBS has reported that Iran recently shot down two U.S. drones.

The visa contrast is the fact that other governments will use in the hall. A country at war with the United States is admitted under the Headquarters Agreement. The president of the Palestinian Authority, which is not at war with the United States, is not. The legal distinction is real: Iran is a UN member; Palestine is an observer state. The political reading in many capitals will ignore that distinction and treat the two decisions as a single choice.

Travel limits and the luxury ban are designed to keep the Iranian visit inside the UN district. They do not keep Pezeshkian off the podium. If he uses Wednesday's slot to talk about the Minab school strike or the tanker fire in Hormuz, the host country that issued the visa will have to sit through it. That is the cost of the Headquarters Agreement, and it is the reason the State Department framed the decision as an obligation rather than a favour.