Abbas heads home to hero’s welcome

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is due home from New York to a hero’s welcome today, after the UN voted to recognise Palestine as a non-member state. The main official event will be a celebratory rally and a speech by Abbas at his Ramallah headquarters, starting at midday. He landed in Amman yesterday and was scheduled to spend the night in Jordan, returning to the Israeli-occupied West Bank this morning. On Thursday, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution recognising Palestine within the 1967 borders as a non-member observer state. Israel lashed out in response, with an official on Friday telling AFP of plans to build 3,000 new settler homes in the West Bank including annexed east Jerusalem, without specifying exactly where they were to be located. Asked to confirm media reports that the measure was a consequence of the UN vote, the official said: “it’s true.” The reports said that part of the building would be in east Jerusalem but the official said only that “we make no distinction,” between the city’s east and west sides. Arab east Jerusalem was captured by Israel with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed in a move not...