U.S. Threatens Palestinian U.N. Envoys’ Visas Over Assembly Bid

Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Riyad Mansour (Wikimedia Commons)

The Trump regime is threatening to revoke the visas of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations unless Ambassador Riyad Mansour drops his candidacy for vice president of the U.N. General Assembly, according to a leaked State Department cable obtained by NPR.

The May 19 cable, marked sensitive but unclassified, instructs U.S. diplomats in Jerusalem to pressure Palestinian officials this week to withdraw the bid for one of the 21 vice president roles, or face possible consequences including visa revocation. It argues that Mansour “has a history of accusing Israel of genocide,” and that his bid “fuels tension” and undermines President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza. This is despite the fact that the UN has already found that Israel did indeed commit genocide in Gaza, that the tensions are fuelled by consistent Israeli aggression, and the fact that Trump’s “Gaza plan” has been entirely ineffective.

Former officials called the move unusual. Hady Amr, a senior State Department official on Palestinian affairs under the Obama and Biden administrations, said that short of extreme situations like espionage or election interference, using visa restrictions in this way is extremely rare and generally counterproductive.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s office argued the threat violates the U.N. headquarters agreement, which requires the U.S., as host of the U.N. in New York, not to refuse visas for officials traveling to the world body for the General Assembly. Washington has stretched that obligation before, denying visas to Iranian and Russian officials, as well as former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, citing national security reasons.

This is the second time this year the U.S. has pushed Mansour off a senior U.N. post. In February, he withdrew a bid for president of the U.N. General Assembly after U.S. lobbying, a move Israeli U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon publicly celebrated. The latest pressure also reverses a recent concession: in September 2025, the State Department waived visa sanctions and other inadmissibilities for Palestinian officials assigned to the PLO’s U.N. Observer Mission in New York.

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