Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ declaration at the UN General Assembly that his people were no longer bound by mutual agreements with Israel, including the Oslo Peace Accords, brought the media spotlight back to the Middle East peace process last week.

Abbas cited the Israeli regime’s systematic violation of the mutual pacts as the reasons for his declaration, as media outlets around the world debated the merits of such a move. The hard-hitting critique of the violations listed by Abbas included issues from water rights and transfer of monies, to colony building, house demolitions and the continued Israeli military occupation which has given Israel “exclusive control of 62 per cent of the West Bank”.

“The sad political reality behind Mahmoud Abbas’ ‘bombshell’ declaration on Wednesday… is that there was so little left to disown,” said the New York Times. Treading back in history, the paper noted the secret negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords — which launched what has been known ever since as “the peace process,” a series of staged actions that were supposed to lead to a final peace settlement. “When Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn 22 years ago, it seemed that the way to an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on the existence of two states was finally open. But it was not long before the optimistic timetable broke down amid suicide bombings … unceasing expansion of [colonies], military clashes and ever more bitter mutual recriminations. Repeated bouts of negotiations collapsed; the last American attempt at getting talks going fell apart in 2014,” the paper said in an editorial.

Observing that “it is hard to gauge what President Abbas’ declaration amounts to,” the paper said: “He did not specify what tangible actions might follow his rejection of Oslo.. Bombshell or not, it is not a speech to be lightly dismissed. Mr Abbas is among the last of Mr Arafat’s generation of leaders who led the Palestinians … to recognition of the state of Israel, and the Oslo Accords represented enormous concessions both by them. But the failure of everyone — Palestinians, Israelis and Americans — to build on the promise of Oslo is a tragedy for all.”

Commenting on the same issue, the USA Today argued that instead of creating more concessions for Palestinians, Abbas’s move could be counterproductive, specially with someone like the Benjamin Netanyahu in charge of the Israeli regime.

Abbas hoped the threat to abandon Oslo could perhaps create a new dynamic in which “pressure applied through UN institutions forces Israel into concessions that the US-brokered peace process has not attained,” the paper said. “Sadly for the Palestinians, it is more likely to do the opposite, reviving hostility and polarisation that the peace process, glacial though it may be, has contained… To be sure, Netanyahu’s bullheaded refusal to renew a freeze on [colony] construction as a condition of negotiations set Abbas on this path… Netanyahu has assumed his usual hostile stance, bristling with non-specific threats that might include such counterproductive steps as formal annexation of territory. Netanyahu has also used Israel’s formidable lobbying power in the US to get congressional sabres rattling,” the paper said.

The Guardian meanwhile connected Abbas’ speech to a darker future for the peace process itself, though, it noted that the Palestinian president did not announce the cancellation of security cooperation with Israel as some had speculated he would.

“Abbas had gone to New York hoping to secure commitments from the US secretary of state, John Kerry, that Washington would breath life into the moribund peace process — guarantees he failed to secure from a US administration distracted elsewhere in the region,” the paper said, adding that the result was the UN speech where he pointed out that Israel’s refusal to commit to the Oslo agreements signed “render us [Palestinians] an authority without real powers”.

The paper then pointed out that according to a poll undertaken by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, a majority of Palestinians no longer believed that a two-state solution is realistic, with showed 57 per cent saying they support a return to an armed intifada in the absence of peace negotiations. “The figure was similar to numbers seen ahead of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000... If a spark comes along, there is absolutely no doubt that the Palestinian situation today is very, very fertile for a major eruption,” it said.