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What's behind Israeli report claiming Abbas was KGB spy?

Israeli researchers have accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of having been a KGB agent, to wide criticism from Palestinians who see the claim as part of an Israeli smear campaign to get rid of Abbas.
Gideon Remez, one of the Israeli researchers who said on Thursday that Soviet-era documents showed that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas worked in the 1980s for the KGB, the now-defunct Russian intelligence agency, holds up a page he received after some documents smuggled out of Russia by a former KGB archivist were released for public research two years ago, with a line in Russian reading, " "Krotov", which is the derived from the Russian word for "mole" and, "Abbas, Mahmoud, born 1935 in Palestine, mem
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It's no secret that Israeli-Palestinian relations have been marred by tension since mid-2014. At that time, the path toward a political solution reached an impasse and negotiations were suspended, leading to nonstop Israeli accusations that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is not a partner for peace and that he has been inciting violence against Israelis.

The latest Israeli allegation against Abbas came in a report broadcast by Israel’s Channel 1 on Sept. 7, claiming that Abbas was an agent for the Soviet KGB when he was a member of Fatah’s Central Committee in 1983. According to the report, Abbas’ code name was "Krotov," and he was recruited during his Ph.D. studies in Moscow and served as a KGB agent in Syria.

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