On 26 July, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced the creation of a committee to study how to stop the implementation of all the agreements signed with Israel, without giving more details. “We announce the leadership’s decision to stop implementing the agreements signed with the Israeli side”, Abbas said. This decision came as a consequence of the last Israeli demolition of several Palestinian buildings in Sur Baher (East Jerusalem), a fact that Abbas considers as “ethnic cleansing”. During the Palestinian leadership meeting in Ramallah, he added that “there is no peace, no security and no stability […] without our Palestinian people achieving their full rights” and that he arrives to this decision because Israel “ignores” all the signed agreements with Palestine. After Abbas’ speech, Hamas released a statement in support of the Palestinian President. In August, tensions between Israel and Palestine rose due to several announcements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the first week of August, Netanyahu announced that Israel approved plans for building 2,304 new settlement homes in the occupied West Bank and on 1 September he commented his intention to annex all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The EU strongly condemned both Israeli demolitions and settlements’ building considering them “illegal under international law”.