Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas opened his Fatah movement's first congress in 20 years Tuesday with a call to step up nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and to keep faith in peace talks despite years of setbacks to the dream of statehood. But he stopped short of renouncing a clause of Fatah's founding charter that prescribes "armed revolution" against the Jewish state.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was touring Latin America this week, his second visit to the region in less than a year as part of a worldwide lobbying effort to gain recognition for a Palestinian state. Abbas met officials in the Colombian capital of Bogota on Monday, a day after announcing with President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador plans to establish diplomatic ties there. Until recently, El Salvador was one of Israel's closest allies in Latin America. "We are very interested in developing our relations with all the countries of the American continent," Abbas said in San Salvador, according to a Spanish translation of his remarks.

In an incident that boded ill for the interim Palestinian government's efforts to keep order, gunmen in the Gaza Strip unleashed bursts of automatic-weapons fire Sunday near Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, panicking his bodyguards and leaving two security men dead. Abbas, 69, was unhurt in the gunfire that erupted just after he and his entourage arrived at a mourning tent in Gaza City in honor of his predecessor as Palestine Liberation Organization chief, Yasser Arafat, who died Thursday.

At first the Kamal family wasn't even sure they'd watch. As an exuberant crowd of thousands gathered a few blocks away to listen to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ask for U.N. recognition, the family preferred the quiet of their living room. After years of stalemate with Israel, their expectations were low. And as Nihad Kamal, a 38-year-old investment manager, explained: "We're not big fans of demonstrations. " But ultimately, the Kamals did tune their flat-panel television to watch Abbas.

The apparent heir to Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization is a bespectacled pragmatist with a fierce devotion to the Palestinian cause but little stomach for the rough and tumble of politics.

The older couple found a place in the crowd and peered through the fence at an Israeli checkpoint. They had been waiting for four years. Their son was among 255 prisoners released Friday by Israel in an effort to prop up embattled Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his emergency government here in Ramallah. The Palestinians chanted their support as Abbas addressed the former prisoners and their relatives from the steps of the presidential palace.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Sunday that he was close to persuading Palestinian militant groups to stop their attacks on Israelis, and Israel suggested it would curtail military operations in the Gaza Strip if militants held their fire. Abbas said in an interview on Palestinian television that he expected to have a truce in hand "very soon," after days of meetings with militant groups in Gaza. "We can say that there has been significant progress in the talks.

After 50 years in exile, Mahmoud Abbas finally had the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream: to visit the home where he spent part of his boyhood. In 1994, he made the pilgrimage to Safed in northern Israel, which was part of British-run Palestine when he was born in 1935. Accounts of the visit say Abbas was moved and shocked by what he saw: moved to be back in his hometown, shocked to discover that his old house no longer existed, overtaken by time and new development.

His treasury is broke, his calls for peace talks with Israel rebuffed, and gun-toting activists in his Fatah party are in a rage over its electoral trouncing by Hamas. For Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who recently completed his first year in office, an already challenging tenure just became significantly more difficult. Some question whether Abbas, who has proved to be a weak, if well-intentioned figure, can last.

As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas prepares to embark down a well-trod path of peace talks — a road he's spent a career helping to pave — the pragmatic leader is risking his political future in what some predict could be his last trip to the negotiating table. It's little wonder Abbas has responded with ambivalence to the U.S.-sponsored direct talks, set to begin Thursday in Washington. After months of hesitation, Abbas agreed to participate only after heavy American pressure and despite deep pessimism among his own people and supporters.

Diplomats on Tuesday raced to nail down a plan to deflect the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations, crafting a face-saving formula that could lessen the immediate prospect of a Security Council veto, which the Obama administration desperately sought to avoid. Under the plan, the council decision on the application for recognition, which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas plans to make Friday, would be put off indefinitely. That would buy time for the U.S. to try to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and would keep $600 million a year in American aid and other international assistance flowing to the Palestinians.

Rebuffing international pressure to soften their positions and return to the negotiating table, Israelis and Palestinians announced separately Thursday that they were moving forward with an expected diplomatic battle next week at the United Nations. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will address the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 23, after which he will submit a formal application to admit Palestine into the international body as a state, according to his foreign minister, Riad Malki.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday that no amount of international pressure or any last-minute concessions, including a settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, would stop him from taking the Palestinian statehood plan to the U.N. Security Council this month. In a briefing with foreign journalists at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Abbas brushed aside warnings he said he had received this week from American officials about a possible confrontation with the United States, as well as the flurry of diplomatic efforts launched by the Mideast "quartet" — the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — to craft a compromise.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is back on the tightrope. The last time he tried a high-stakes balancing act with rival Hamas, he famously plunged off the wire. After the militant group won parliamentary elections in 2006 and was promptly boycotted by Israel, the U.S. and Europe, an attempt at a unity government unraveled into open warfare between the rival Palestinian factions. But in the wake of a May 4 reconciliation deal with the Islamist Hamas, which the U.S. and Israel label as a terrorist organization, he's gambling on a better safety net this time.

Rival Palestinian factions celebrated the signing of a reconciliation pact they hope will end their four-year split and accelerate efforts to form an independent state. But the agreement faces fierce opposition from Israel, places new hurdles on American-led efforts to forge a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, and still must overcome lingering distrust between the two factions: the moderate secular Fatah party in the West Bank and the militant Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

A massive archive of documents leaked to Al Jazeera and Britain's Guardian newspaper offers irrefutable proof that years of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been an empty sham. The papers make clear that the time has come for Palestinians and anyone interested in the cause of justice to abandon the charade of official diplomacy and pursue other, more creative and nonviolent paths toward the realization of a genuine, just peace. The leaked documents, assuming they are genuine ?

For nearly five years Mahmoud Abbas had moved timidly in the shadow of his charismatic predecessor, the late Yasser Arafat. His demeanor matched his somber dark suits, his rambling speeches lulled audiences to sleep, and his indecision led the Palestinians' preeminent political movement to defeat and disarray. Over the last week, however, a more forceful Abbas stepped forward. After cajoling the aging leaders of his Fatah movement to hold its first convention in two decades and put their jobs on the line, he fended off an assault by younger activists on his own record.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced today that he would not seek reelection next year, citing a lack of U.S. support for his conditions for resuming peace talks with Israel. In a televised speech, the 74-year-old Palestinian leader said the move was not a tactic to bring more pressure on Israel, although his language appeared to leave room for a change of heart. Visibly tense, Abbas spoke hours after the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee heard his decision in a closed-door meeting and urged him to reconsider.

As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas prepares to embark down a well-trod path of peace talks — a road he's spent a career helping to pave — the pragmatic leader is risking his political future in what some predict could be his last trip to the negotiating table. It's little wonder Abbas has responded with ambivalence to the U.S.-sponsored direct talks, set to begin Thursday in Washington. After months of hesitation, Abbas agreed to participate only after heavy American pressure and despite deep pessimism among his own people and supporters.

After months of quiet U.S. diplomacy, Israeli and Palestinian leaders appear poised to announce a resumption of direct peace talks, perhaps as early as this week. Nearly two years after the last round of talks broke off, U.S. and allied officials in recent days cleared the final hurdle by persuading Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to take a seat at the negotiating table, officials say. Catherine Ashton, the European Union's top foreign policy official, said in a letter to European officials Friday that Abbas might make an official commitment in the next few days to talks that could begin later this month.