Overview

• Mahmoud Abbas wore a small key-shaped lapel pin during a pre-recorded UN General Assembly address delivered by video after the United States denied him a visa.
• Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted a screenshot on X, calling the pin an unmistakable sign of a plan to erase Israel and alleging an old PLO strategy to push millions of 1948 refugees’ descendants into the country.
• The ministry urged Arab states to grant citizenship to Palestinians residing there and asserted a historical narrative that more Jews were expelled from Arab countries than Arabs who left Israel in 1948.
• Outlets explained that the key is widely used in Palestinian culture to remember homes lost in 1948 and to signal a demand for a right of return.
• WION reported that Abbas’s address said Hamas should have no role in a post-war Palestinian government and accused Israel of grave abuses, while commentary such as Rationalist Judaism advanced a competing, disputed account of 1948 responsibility.