Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas Thursday told world leaders at the UN General Assembly of Israel’s unrelenting crimes and atrocities in Gaza, stressing that the Palestinian people would not leave their ancestral homeland as he called for the suspension of Jewish state’s UN membership until it meets its obligations under international law.

“Palestine will remain ours. And if anyone were to leave, it will be the occupying usurpers,” Abbas declared amid loud applause.

He began by highlighting that Palestinians have endured nearly a year of what he described as “one of the most heinous crimes of our time”.

“It is the crime of a full-scale war of genocide that Israel is perpetrating. A crime that has killed more than 40,000 martyrs in Gaza alone, and thousands remain under the rubble. A crime that has injured more than 100,000 injured to this day.”

The Palestinian leader pointed out that whole families had been annihilated, their family names completely erased. He also stressed that amid the onslaught, diseases were spreading, clean water and vital medicines were in scarce supply, and over two million Palestinians had been displaced, many forced to flee multiple times in search of safety.

“The deaths and injuries continue unabated, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank and in Jerusalem,” he said.

President Abbas underscored that he was not speaking today “to respond to the lies” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who claimed before the US Congress in July that Israeli forces did not kill innocent civilians in Gaza.

“I ask you, who is it then that killed more than 15,000 children of the 40,000 and an equal number of women and elderly persons. And who is it then that is continuing to kill them, I ask you?”

Abbas called for freezing Israel’s United Nations membership for failing to accept a two-state resolution to the conflict and allowing the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.

“Israel, which refuses to implement the United Nations resolutions, does not deserve to be a member of this international organization,” he said.

“We are going to submit an application to the UNGA on this matter,” he added.

Israel “has, from the very beginning, not fulfilled the conditions of membership because in 1949, when it submitted its application” for membership, the UN imposed two conditions, Abbas said.

“The first is that Israel accepts Resolution 181,” Abbas said as he referred to the text that backed the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which called for the territory that had been part of mandatory Palestine between the two world wars to be divided into a Jewish and Arab state.