In a speech on behalf of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, PA Foreign Minister Riad Al-Maliki has told the African Union summit that the United States took an "aggressive and one-sided" step when it recognized the occupied Jerusalem as the capital of the "Israeli occupation state" and transferred its embassy from Tel Aviv to the occupied "Al-Quds" (Arabic for Jerusalem from the Hebrew word for holy) in defiance of the international position.
Abbas also accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem by passing laws similar to the laws on which the apartheid regime was based in South Africa.