Two weeks before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, he had warned on Sept. 16 of a “political bomb“ he planned to drop in his speech.

Commentators have argued that while Abbas did threaten to end Palestinian adherence to the 1993 Oslo Accord, he didn’t actually detail when and how he plans to end the legal commitment to the US-sponsored agreement.

Abbas’ comments about the agreement were stated in diplomatic terms. “As long as Israel refuses to cease settlement activities and to release the fourth group of Palestinian prisoners in accordance with our agreements, they leave us no choice but to insist that we will not remain the only ones committed to the implementation of these agreements.”

Abbas’ lawyer-like language didn’t translate into a direct and unequivocal abandonment of the accord. Some commentators said that Abbas’ actions are tantamount to exposing a hand grenade but leaving it unexploded on the table without any date of when it might explode. Others said Abbas pulled the hand grenade’s pin but didn’t throw it, implying that it might blow up in his face.

The conditionality of Abbas’ threat is worth digging into. What are the commitments that the Israelis have violated, and what are the clauses of the Oslo Accord that Abbas will stop honoring?

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Affairs Department published on its website an undated document pointing out nine Israeli violations of the Oslo Accord, among them failure to honor the provisions for ending the occupation, settlements, continued restrictions on movement — including the safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank — and the refusal to release prisoners incarcerated before the signing of the September 1993 agreement at the White House.

Abdelrahman Barqawi, a member of the Palestine National Council and a retired Palestinian Ministry of Health senior official, told Al-Monitor that Palestinians should suspend security cooperation, division of land and economic issues. “The division of our land into areas A, B and C, which inexorably affects our sovereignty and hurts farmers, must end. We should also end the Paris economic agreement, which has damaged our economy, making it subservient to the Israeli financial system.”

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