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The History of Palestinian Authority Rejectionism Towards Israel
Jordan’s King Abdullah II speaks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, during a group photo of Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, March 31, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Zoubeir Souissi / Pool / File.
For decades, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has rejected Israel’s right to exist. This rejectionism has a long historical background, and is deeply rooted in antipathy towards Jews and a Jewish state in any borders.
In February 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin explained why Britain would not continue its Palestine Mandate:
His Majesty’s Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles … For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. [emphasis added]
[Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, UK parliament, February 18, 1947]
The Palestinian Arabs’ “essential principle” in 1947 of rejecting “Jewish sovereignty” in any part of the land was adopted in 1965 as the core ideology of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This “principle” was reconfirmed in 1988 as the endgame of the PLO’s program to destroy Israel in stages, and it continues today as key to the doctrine of the PA.
While the PA on occasion has recognized the fact of Israel’s existence — solely for public relations reasons — it has never wavered in its rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
Even in front of world leaders at the United Nations last year, Mahmoud Abbas defined Israel as a “foreign entity,” established both “for colonialist purposes”and to “get rid of the Jews.” He worded it as “two birds with one stone.” Abbas did not need to elaborate any further.
The PA leadership close to him, his colleagues in Fatah, and PA children’s education programming on official PA channels all openly reiterate the same ideology on a regular basis — that Israel is an artificial state with no right to exist, and thus is destined for oblivion.
As Israel celebrated 76 years of independence this year, this rejectionist ideology remains the most fundamental message of the internal Palestinian conversation.
Just days before Israel’s Independence Day, PA TV featured a preacher who articulated the vision: “It is our duty to fight, confront, and carry out Ribat [i.e., religious conflict] in this land … and Allah willing Palestine will return free, from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River.”
The anticipation of Israel’s destruction is not limited to TV sermons, but is the fundamental message that has been passed on to Palestinian children, constituting the essence of its vision for the future.
This map in Fatah’s children’s magazine tells the whole story.
[Fatah’s children’s magazine Waed, Issue 41, April 2022]
“Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” is not a Hamas slogan that was initiated after October 7. It is a PA/Fatah slogan that has been adopted by all Palestinian terror factions as well as their supporters around the world.
The four critical drivers of PA rejectionism
The PA has built its rejection of Israel’s right to exist into a full science with a number of critical components:
1. The PA denies all the fully documented Israeli/Jewish history in the Land of Israel/Judea. The following are some of the thousands of examples of the PA’s transmission of this message:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina: “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are among the foundational pillars of history, and they are Palestinian holy places, and not Jewish holy places. There is no historical proof — despite all the excavations — that [the Jews] had any kind of presence in this land.”
[Official PA TV News, March 20, 2023]
Director of the National Action Committee in Jerusalem Muhammad Jadallah: “The false Israeli narrative, the alleged Jewish Israeli narrative, that they have relics in this city [of Jerusalem] — [None] of them for dozens of years have succeeded in finding [even] a tiny bit that belongs to them from any period of the long historical periods … Their narrative is false, but they want to falsify the true story, the correct story, the Palestinian Arab Islamic Christian story. They claim that they have roots in this city — and they completely understand that they have no roots.”
[Official PA TV, To the Capital We Will Go, April 30, 2023]
These denials come from the highest levels of the PA.
Abbas’ Advisor and PA Supreme Shari’ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “It has been proven that the continuous truth in this land is the Palestinian people, whose Canaanite ancestors lived in it more than 5,000 years ago … There was no First Temple and no Second Temple, and there also will be no Third Temple.” [emphasis added]
[WAFA, official PA news agency, March 20, 2023]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “It is not possible, if we are objective, to call the human Israeli component a ‘nation.’ There never existed a Jewish nation nor a nation of Israel. They [Europeans] invented this issue in order to gather the Jews for colonialist goals that we all know.”
[PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Facebook page, Feb. 28, 2024]
2. Once the PA denies Israel’s history and right to exist, it then must explain why the Jews are there at all.
To do so, it defines Israel as a colonial implant intended both to establish Western control and to solve the world’s Jewish problem by finding a place to dump the “human waste.” The following are some examples, starting with Mahmoud Abbas at the UN in 2023:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas at the UN: “Britain and the United States … decided to establish and plant a foreign entity in our historic homeland, for colonialist purposes of their own… The truth is that these Western countries wanted to get rid of the Jews–and profit from them in Palestine. ‘Two birds with one stone.’” [emphasis added]
[Archive news, YouTube channel, May 15, 2023]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “The colonialist states conspired together to issue [the Balfour Declaration] — and foremost among them was Britain and America — in order to get rid of the Jews in Europe on the one hand and establish a so-called national home for them in Palestine on the other hand. The truth is that they wanted to build an outpost to protect their interests in our region.”
[Official PA TV, Feb. 12, 2023]
Palestinian researcher Muhammad Al-Yahya: “The Jews are arrogant by nature. They don’t accept the other. They always stick to themselves. The Europeans hated them and wanted to get rid of them, and therefore one of the interests of the European states… was to get rid of the Jews, so the idea started of establishing a Jewish state for the Jews… Their [Jewish] thinking is based on racism that caused them to be hated everywhere. The Zionist thinking is based on them being ‘God’s chosen people.’
In the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in what was leaked of [it], there is a parenthetical sentence that they are fulfilling that has caused them to be hated by all peoples: ‘God created the land, and afterwards He created man to prepare the land for them [the Jews], and afterwards He created them so that they would be masters over them.’ The pure Jew has the outlook that he is of the people chosen by God.”
[Official PA TV, Returning, Jan. 17, 2023 and Feb. 27, 2023, May 14, 2023]
Palestinian political commentator Kamal Zakarneh: “They [Europe and America] are demonstrating a lot of solidarity with the Israeli occupation … Europe and America — succeeded in getting rid of the Jews, whom they themselves view as human waste, and they threw them out into Palestine. They created a place for them far away from them, far away from Europe. They don’t want reverse migration now and their [Jews’] return to Europe again.
They, Europe and America, are prepared to provide all the aid they can … to strengthen the occupation and leave the Jews where they are. [US President Joe] Biden said this during the events in Israel: ‘If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.’ He would have invented it to absorb the human waste.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Oct. 24, 2023]
3. Nevertheless, denial of Israel’s history and right to the land is not enough to create a Palestinian right. So, the PA invented a history of its own, claiming that it represents a 5,000-year-old people who are descendants of Canaanites:
PA Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities Director of Historical Sites Dirgham Al-Fares: “The Palestinian people today is a continuation of the original residents from the Stone Age … There was no monotheistic religion throughout the Iron Age. The Jewish religion formulated during the period of Babylonian Exile, and the ones who formulated it and developed it and developed the concept of divinity (i.e., monotheism) were our ancestors. We accepted the Jewish religion, and the Christian religion, and Islam.
Therefore, we always say that everything on the land of Palestine and the antiquities within it are a heritage of the Palestinian people, in any period and regardless of the character of the place, whether it is a place of worship, a synagogue, a church, or a mosque. And here a question could pop up for some people:
If we are the ancient Jews and we own the cultural heritage, then who is the occupier? … It is the right of the Jews in the world to come to Palestine for religious tourism, but under the sovereignty of the Palestinian state and according to the laws of the Palestinian state… Everything on the Palestinian land is ours. We own the land and the history… When I speak about Palestine, I’m of course talking about historical Palestine (i.e., both Israel and the PA areas.) These are our antiquities and this is what is proven by archaeology and the historical truths.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Sept. 13, 2023]
This is of course egregiously false. There is no Palestinian Arab history before the modern period. Absent of any such evidence, the PA, at its highest levels, simply denies whatever does not fit into its narrative:
Official PA TV host: “This site [i.e., the Western Wall] will remain the Al-Buraq Wall, to which only the Muslims have a right. Not as the occupation [i.e., Israel] claims in its mistaken Zionist narrative that this is the Wailing Wall. And it will return to its original state when the transient settlers leave … The Jews used the site as a place of worship only after the publication of the British Balfour Declaration in 1917, and this wall was not part of the alleged Jewish Temple.”
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, June 14, 2023]
To reinforce its efforts to establish a false history, PA leaders in the official PA-owned media often combine creation of a new narrative together with its denial of Israel’s right to exist:
Official PA TV commentator Iyad Abu Zneit: “We [Palestinians] are first of all Canaanites, and therefore we have been in this land for many years … The Israelis are the ones who need to return to the lands they came from, lands throughout the world. Israel by its very nature is a foreign element. They established a state and afterwards brought residents to it.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 14, 2023]
4. Finally, since Israel has no right to exist according to the PA, justice will only be achieved when Israel is removed and all Jews are expelled.
This was articulated by a senior Fatah official just three weeks after Hamas’ October 7 massacre. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his top religious advisor have also said it many times before:
Fatah Secretary in Spain Ahmed Ma’arouf: “Let them [Israelis] learn from history: There is no occupier who remained … The top priority is to strengthen the resolve of the Palestinian people on the Palestinian land in order to continue to resist. The day will come when we will sweep away this occupation from every centimeter [of Palestine].” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Oct. 29, 2023]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas:“We have been the owners of this land since this land’s existence … We will remain in this land forever, while the attackers [Israelis] have no place in Jerusalem and no place here.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV News, Jan. 17, 2022]
Abbas Advisor and PA Supreme Shari’ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “[The] claim that this land is sacred to the Jews is based on fables … The foreigners [Jews] will leave, today or tomorrow. This land spits out its scum. It spits out everything that is foreign to it, and it will not be anything but ours.”
[Official PA TV Jan. 10, 2020]
Preacher on PA TV: “It is our duty to fight, confront, and carry out Ribat [i.e., religious conflict] in this land as much as we can. It is our duty to reject all the expressions of settlement, colonialism, and occupation … We reject all the expressions of the occupation [i.e., Israel], and Allah willing Palestine will return free, from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, May 10, 2024]
Fatah’s children’s education likewise defines Israelis as “invaders” and promises that every single Jew will leave the land:
“There is no invader who invaded this land and did not leave it defeated in the end, and that is what will happen to the Zionist invaders.” [emphasis added]
[Waed, Issue 27, p. 23]
Algeria received independence in 1962, after 132 years of colonialism … At the end of the period of French colonialism, the number of French settlers in Algeria stood at approximately a million, and they all fled to France and left Algeria to the Arabs and Algerians.
Algeria’s experience assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end. [emphasis added]
[Waed, Fatah’s children’s magazine, ages 6 -15, Issue 28, p. 25]
The PA science of rejecting Israel is perhaps summed up best by this recent staff editorial in its official daily:
Seventy-six years of Nakba, the handiwork of the colonialist West that used it to strike and wound Palestine, which is still bleeding … Seventy-six years, and every Palestinian has his story about this great injustice… [The Israelis] took control of the land with violent colonialist behavior, and with an even more violent falsification. They claimed that the land is a land without a people for a people without a land and gave it a name [Israel] that would fit their fabricated Zionist narrative, which is still not recognized and which is unable to erase the name that the land has had since the dawn of history. Therefore, our [Palestinian] poet [Mahmoud Darwish] wrote: ‘It was called Palestine, and it is now called Palestine’… The stone of the youth in the great [first] Intifada (i.e., Palestinian wave of violence and terror against Israel, approximately 200 Israelis murdered, 1987-1993)… is still in their hand against the occupation (i.e., Israel). Their call is still heard, the call of freedom and independence, until the Nakba is defeated along with all the injustice and darkness that it caused, and this will certainly happen.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida website, May 15, 2024]
Israel moves forward in 2024 while PA remains stuck in 1947
While Israel in 2024 celebrates 76 years of independence accompanied by incredible growth, progress, and creativity that have benefited all humanity, the Palestinian Authority remains trapped in 1947, rejecting any “Jewish sovereignty” and refusing to live beside Israel as a neighbor.
Worse yet, the PA has indoctrinated the entire Palestinian population with these and many other hate messages together with justification and glorification of terror. This makes peaceful coexistence alongside the current Palestinian population an impossibility, and the creation of a Palestinian state an existential threat for Israel.
It is not enough for the PA to simply recognize the reality that Israel happens to exist. If it wishes to make any progress, it must accept the principle of Israel’s right to exist, reject its own falsifications of history, accept the truth of Israel’s history, and actively reeducate its population.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is PMW’s Founder and Director. A version of this article originally appeared at PMW.
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In Reversal, Trump Says Russia Attacked Ukraine
US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they meet in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump reversed course on Friday and said Russia did in fact invade Ukraine, and that Kyiv would soon sign a minerals agreement with the United States as part of efforts to end the Ukraine war.
Trump had said on Tuesday that Ukraine “should have never started” the war three years ago, prompting a wave of criticism both domestically and internationally. Pressed on the subject in an interview with Fox News Radio on Friday, he acknowledged Russia had invaded Ukraine on the order of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Russia attacked, but they shouldn’t have let him attack,” Trump said, adding that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and then-US President Joe Biden should have taken steps to avert the invasion.
Later, Trump predicted a minerals agreement would be reached soon.
“We’re signing an agreement, hopefully in the next fairly short period of time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about a possible deal for Ukraine’s minerals.
Zelensky said separately on Friday that Ukrainian and US teams were working on a draft agreement. “I am hoping for … a fair result,” he said in a video address after sharp exchanges this week between the two leaders.
Trump denounced Zelensky as a “dictator” on Wednesday and warned he had to move quickly to secure peace with Russia, which invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, or risk losing his country.
The change in tone from the United States, Ukraine’s most important backer, has alarmed European officials and stoked fears that Kyiv could be forced into a peace deal that favors Putin.
Zelensky had said Trump was trapped in a “disinformation bubble,” but later toned down his statements and said he was hoping for American pragmatism.
Zelensky on Wednesday rejected US demands for $500 billion in mineral wealth from Ukraine to repay Washington for wartime aid, saying the United States had supplied nowhere near that sum so far and offered no specific security guarantees in the agreement.
Ukraine has valuable deposits of strategic minerals that the US wants. These include uranium, lithium, cobalt, rare earths and more and are used in applications such as batteries, technology and aerospace.
‘THEY DON’T HAVE ANY CARDS’
Speaking at a White House event earlier on Friday, Trump was critical of Zelensky while refraining from negative comments about Putin.
“I’ve had very good talks with Putin, and I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine,” Trump said. “They don’t have any cards, but they’re playing tough.”
Separately, the United States on Friday proposed a United Nations resolution to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The three-paragraph US draft, seen by Reuters, mourns loss of life during the “Russia-Ukraine conflict” and “implores a swift end to the conflict.”
Kyiv and its European allies want their own text to be adopted by the UN General Assembly on Monday calling for de-escalation, an early cessation of hostilities and peaceful resolution to the conflict.
The German government said on Friday that Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Zelensky agreed in a phone call that Ukraine must have a seat at the table in peace talks.
Polish President Andrzej Duda, meanwhile, urged Zelensky to keep up calm and constructive cooperation with Trump.
Duda, whose term in office expires this year, was one of Trump’s preferred international partners during his 2017-2021 presidency and they have described themselves as friends.
Poland’s president is due to meet Trump in Washington on Saturday, Poland’s state news agency PAP reported.
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Syrian Refugee Arrested After Berlin Stabbing as Germany Prepares to Vote
Police officers work at the Berlin Holocaust memorial after a suspected knife attack, February 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
A Syrian refugee arrested over the stabbing of a tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial had been planning “to kill Jews,” prosecutors said on Saturday, the day before an election which is expected to see a surge in support for the anti-migrant AfD.
The 19-year-old suspect appears to have been planning to kill Jews for several weeks – apparently motivated by the Middle Eastern conflict – which is why he chose this location, the prosecutors said in a statement.
Police arrested the suspect, whose hands and trousers were smeared with blood, shortly after the stabbing on Friday evening.
He was found to be carrying a prayer rug, a Quran, a note with verses from the Quran dated the previous day, and the suspected weapon in his backpack, which suggests a religious motivation, the prosecutors’ statement said.
The 30-year-old Spanish tourist underwent emergency surgery after sustaining injuries to his neck and was placed in an induced coma, the statement added, although he was no longer in a life-threatening condition.
Campaigning for Sunday’s election has been marred by a series of high-profile attacks in which the suspects are from migrant backgrounds, shifting the focus away from Germany’s ailing economy and boosting support for the far-right Alternative for Germany. Opinion polls show the AfD is on track to secure second place behind the conservative CDU/CSU bloc.
A January stabbing in which two people were killed, including a toddler, was blamed on an Afghan immigrant, prompting the CDU/CSU bloc to break a taboo on cooperating with the far right to push a motion cracking down on migration through parliament with the AfD’s support.
In December, a Saudi man who had lived in Germany for years, and whose social media posts indicated he sympathized with the AfD, rammed a car into a Christmas market, killing six and injuring hundreds.
The Holocaust memorial, one of the German capital’s most sacred sites, commemorates the six million Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two, one of the darkest episodes in human history and a continuing focus of German historical atonement.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser of the center-left Social Democrats, who have been accused of not doing enough for German security, said the perpetrator must be punished with the full severity of the law and immediately deported from prison.
“We will use all available means to deport violent offenders back to Syria,” she said. “Anyone who commits such acts and so disgustingly abuses the protection offered in Germany has forfeited any right to remain in our country.”
There is, so far, no evidence linking the suspect in Friday’s stabbing to any other persons or organizations, prosecutors said.
The suspect, who arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor, had no prior criminal record in Berlin and was previously unknown to both the police and the judicial authorities.
He was, however, known to police in the eastern state of Saxony, where he lived, for minor offenses related to general criminal activity, Bild newspaper cited the Saxon interior ministry as saying. The ministry did not reply to a request for comment.
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US Piles Pressure on Iraq to Resume Kurdish Oil Exports
FILE PHOTO: An oil field is seen in Kirkuk, Iraq October 18, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani/File Photo
US President Donald Trump’s administration is piling pressure on Iraq to allow Kurdish oil exports to restart or face sanctions alongside Iran, eight sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
An advisor to the Iraqi prime minister denied in a statement there had been a threat of sanctions or pressure on the government during its communications with the US administration.
A speedy resumption of exports from Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region would help to offset a potential fall in Iranian oil exports, which Washington has pledged to cut to zero as part of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran.
The US government has said it wants to isolate Iran from the global economy and eliminate its oil export revenues in order to slow Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon.
Iraq’s oil minister made a surprise announcement on Monday that exports from Kurdistan would resume next week. That would mark the end of a near two-year dispute that has cut flows of more than 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Kurdish oil via Turkey to global markets.
Reuters spoke to eight sources in Baghdad, Washington and Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, who said that mounting pressure from the new US administration was a key driver behind Monday’s announcement.
All of the sources declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Iran views its neighbor and ally Iraq as vital for keeping its economy afloat amidst sanctions. But Baghdad, a partner to both the United States and Iran, is wary of being caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s policy to squeeze Tehran, the sources said.
Trump wants Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to sever economic and military ties with Iran. Last week, Reuters reported that Iraq’s central bank blocked five more private banks from dollar access at the request of the U.S. Treasury.
Iraq’s announcement on export resumption was hurried and lacked detail on how it would address technical issues that need to be resolved before flows can restart, four of the eight sources also.
Iran wields considerable military, political and economic influence in Iraq through its powerful Shi’ite militias and the political parties it backs in Baghdad. But the increased US pressure comes at a time when Iran has been weakened by Israel’s attacks on its regional proxies.
Farhad Alaaldin, a foreign affairs adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, said in a statement there was no U.S. threat to impose sanctions if oil exports were not resumed. He noted Iraq’s parliament had already passed a law establishing a price for the oil and it was down to the companies involved to start pumping it to the pipeline.
“Decisions related to the management of national resources are taken in accordance with Iraqi sovereignty and in a way that serves the country’s economic interests,” he said.
CURB SMUGGLING
With the pipeline taking Kurdish crude to the Turkish port of Ceyhan closed since 2023, the smuggling of Kurdish oil to Iran by truck has flourished. The US is urging Baghdad to curb this flow, six of the eight sources said.
Reuters reported in July that an estimated 200,000 barrels per day of cut-price crude was being smuggled from Kurdistan to Iran and, to a lesser extent, Turkey by truck. The sources said the exports remained at around that level.
“Washington is pressuring Baghdad to ensure Kurdish crude is exported to global markets through Turkey rather than being sold cheaply to Iran,” said an Iraqi oil official with knowledge of the crude trucking shipments crossing to Iran.
While the closure of the Turkish pipeline has prompted an uptick in Kurdish oil smuggling via Iran, a larger network that some experts believe generates at least $1 billion a year for Iran and its proxies has flourished in Iraq since al-Sudani took office in 2022, Reuters reported last year.
Two US administration officials confirmed the US had asked the Iraqi government to resume Kurdish exports. One of them said the move would help to dampen upward pressure on oil prices.
Asked about the administration’s pressuring of Iraq to open up Kurdish oil exports, a White House official said: “It’s not only important for regional security that our Kurdish partners be allowed to export their own oil but also help keep the price of gas low.”
There has been close military cooperation between authorities in Kurdistan and the United States in the fight against Islamic State.
Trump’s restoration of the “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran was one of his first acts after returning to office in late January. In addition to efforts to drive Iran’s oil exports to zero, Trump ordered the US treasury secretary to ensure that Iran can’t use Iraq’s financial system.
Trump also came into office promising to lower energy costs for Americans. A sharp drop in oil exports from Iran could drive up oil prices, and with it the gasoline price worldwide.
The resumption of Kurdish exports would help offset some of the loss to global supply of lower Iranian exports, but would cover only a fraction of the more than 2 million bpd of crude and fuel that Iran ships. However, Iran has proven adept in the past at finding means to circumvent US sanctions on its oil sales.
Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, said the restart of exports from Kurdistan could help increase global oil supplies at a time when output was disrupted from other regions, such as Kazakhstan, where exports have dropped this week following a Ukrainian drone attack on a major pipeline pumping station in southern Russia.
“At this point in time, I believe the market has adopted a relatively neutral but nervous stance on crude oil prices,” he said.
HURDLES TO RESTART
The pipeline was halted by Turkey in March 2023 after the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ordered Ankara to pay Baghdad $1.5 billion in damages for unauthorized exports between 2014 and 2018.
There are still unresolved issues around payment, pricing and maintenance, the sources told Reuters. Two days of talks in the Kurdish city of Erbil this week failed to reach agreement, sources said.
The federal government wanted exports to restart without making commitments to the KRG on payments and without clarity on the payment mechanism, a source familiar with the matter said.
“We can’t do that. We need clear visibility on guarantees,” the source said.
Oil companies working in Kurdistan also have questions over payments.
Executives from Norwegian firm DNO told analysts on Feb. 6 that before agreeing to ship oil through the pipeline to Ceyhan they wanted to understand how the company would be paid for future deliveries and how it would recoup $300 million for the oil it had delivered before the pipeline was shut.
Turkey has yet to receive any information from Iraq on the resumption of flows, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar told Reuters on Wednesday.
A restart could also cause issues in OPEC+, or the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries plus Russia and other allies, where Iraq has been under pressure to comply with its pledge to reduce its output. Additional supply from the Kurdish region could put Iraq over its OPEC+ supply target.
An Iraqi official said it was possible for Iraq to restart the pipeline and remain compliant with OPEC+ supply policy.
Giovanni Staunovo, a commodity analyst at investment bank UBS, said the overall impact of the resumption could be muted.
“From an oil market perspective, Iraq is bound to the OPEC+ production deal, so I wouldn’t expect additional production from Iraq in case of a pipeline restart, but just a change in the way it is exported (currently, among others, using trucks),” he said.
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