The Times of Israel magazine website said on Tuesday that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused the European Union of failing to put pressure on Israel to make the move to hold general elections in East Jerusalem a success.

According to the website, President Abbas's statements came during a meeting with the Palestinian community in the United States at dawn today, as quoted from sources who attended the meeting.

President Abbas stated, during the meeting, that the European Union pushed him to hold the elections, and informed him that it would convince Israel to allow them to take place in East Jerusalem, but he failed to achieve that.

President Abbas considered what happened to be “just talk,” noting that the European Union did not do more than that.

According to the sources quoted by the site, the head of the authority is frustrated about the way the European Union acted regarding this step.

The President indicated that he was determined that elections should be held in East Jerusalem, and based on promises to pressure Israel to agree, he issued a decree in January 2021 to hold legislative elections in May of that year.

He stated that the European Union informed him that the Israeli caretaker government at the time, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, refused to publicly sign a decision to allow the authority to hold the elections.

He pointed out that European Union officials urged him to hold the elections anyway and to enable Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote by mail as they did in the past.

The former European Union ambassador to the Palestinians, Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff, told The Times of Israel in a farewell interview last August, how he tried to persuade President Abbas to hold elections, and that he told him: “My answer to President Abbas was and still is: How do you grant Israel the right to Veto on whether you can exercise your right to political self-determination wherever and whenever you want?

President Abbas told the Palestinian community that he had informed the European Union that he would not negotiate this issue and criticized Brussels for being “just talk” while failing to implement. According to what the Israeli website reported from its sources.