Who is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas?
Trump will sit down with Abbas today.
— -- President Trump will meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today on the second day of his two-day visit to Israel.
The sit-down will mark the second time the two leaders have met since Trump took office and comes amid Trump's first overseas trip as president.
Trump and Abbas will meet in Bethlehem as Trump attempts to broker a peace deal with Israel and Palestinians, one day after Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
"Throughout my lifetime, I've always heard the toughest deal to make is the deal between Israelis and Palestinians," Trump said during a May 3 press conference at the White House alongside Abbas. “Let’s see if we can prove them wrong.”
Trump told Abbas during the press conference, “I want you to be the Palestinian leader to sign the final agreement with Israel.”
The 82-year-old leader of the Palestine Authority has been part of peace talks with the Israelis dating back more than two decades. He was one of the principal negotiators of the Oslo Accords and the 1990s peace agreements. But in 2015 Abbas declared that Palestinian territories are no longer bound by the the Oslo Accords and accused Israel of regularly violating the agreements.
Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority in 2005. He’s one of the founding members of Fatah, the group that eventually dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization and has been at odds with the militant Hamas group.
Former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat appointed Abbas the first Palestinian prime minister in March 2003, but his tenure lasted less than six months. Abbas resigned from his post in September of the same year after a months-long power struggle with Arafat.
Following Arafat's death in 2004, Abbas won the 2005 Palestinian presidential election, receiving over 62 percent of the vote. Abbas was to serve a four-year term but additional elections have been postponed since 2009 over conflict between Fatah and Hamas, which is labelled a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel and others.
Abbas was born in what is now part of the Palestinian territories but he and his family fled to Syria as refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
The future president studied law at Damascus University in Egypt and received his PhD in Moscow. He later walked back portions of his dissertation -- criticized for perpetuating myths about the Holocaust -- upon his appointment as Palestinian prime minister in 2003. He would later call the Holocaust the "most heinous crime in the modern era" in 2014.