PA hopes US will fulfil pledge to reopen E. Jerusalem consulate ahead of Biden visit

The Palestinian Authority hopes that Washington will fulfil its promises to the Palestinians ahead of US President Joe Biden’s visit to the region in July, an unnamed PA official said Monday.

In particular, the Ramallah-based administration is anticipating whether the US will go ahead with its plans to reopen its consulate in the occupied territories. 

The PA official's remarks came shortly after a US State Department delegation visited Ramallah over the weekend and met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The PA is also hoping that Washington will remove Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the US Foreign Terrorist Organisations list.

The US delegation promised to pass on the Palestinian demands to the White House, the official added.

Israel has publicly opposed the plan and suggested that such a mission should not be located in the illegally occupied holy city, but in the West Bank.

Relations between Palestine and the US soured when former US President Donald Trump took office and declared Jerusalem as the capital of Israel while also brokering normalisation deals between Tel Aviv and a number of Arab states.

Trump moved Washington's embassy to Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2018 and shut down a separate facility in the city that served as a consulate for Palestinians.

Biden, who took office in 2020, pledged to reopen it, but no date has been set.

Under the Trump-era re-designation, the former consulate's staff and functions remained largely identical, but they were subordinate to the embassy rather than on a strict US-Palestinian bilateral track.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state and saw Trump's embassy move as undermining that aspiration. Israel, which has illegally occupied East Jerusalem since 1967, calls Jerusalem its indivisible capital.