President Mahmoud Abbas faced a wave of anger today from Palestinians who accuse him of selling out the national cause in favour of Israel under political pressure from the United States.
As frustrations with his perceived weakness boiled over, aides conceded Mr Abbas, (74), was on the defensive. They said he would address the nation, but did not say when.
Two days before he was to receive President Barack Obama's peace envoy, George Mitchell, Mr Abbas looked increasingly vulnerable. In Gaza, an angry crowd threw shoes at his poster and called him a traitor who belonged "in the garbage can of history". Some critics said he was out of touch and should quit.
Never as popular as his late predecessor Yasser Arafat, Mr Abbas has been under a political cloud since September 22nd when he reluctantly acceded to Mr Obama's request to shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York.
There was dismay at home when Palestinians realised that Mr Obama had backtracked from demand that Israel halt all settlement activity in occupied Palestinian land, and that Mr Abbas made no public protest.
New York was seen as a humiliation for the Palestinians, and at the weekend Mr Abbas's future grew darker still when people learned he had agreed at Geneva to delay action on a United Nations report alleging Israeli war crimes in Gaza last January.
"The Palestinian Authority has committed a mistake," said Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo of the Geneva decision. "We admit it. It can be corrected. We are working on that."
Referring to the delay the Palestinians agreed to at the UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, he said the decision to postpone was based on false information. The president will take action to correct that."
The gathering fallout appeared to take Mr Abbas and his Fatah movement by surprise.
Officials said Mr Abbas in his planned broadcast would explain what happened at the Geneva Human Rights Council meeting and what went wrong. But the president was currently in Rome and Palestinians would have to wait a day at least to hear him.
"There is a campaign to politically assassinate the president," said an official who declined to be named.
"The political consequences for Abbas are huge. We'll need a lot of time to repair the damage," he added. The president would probably begin by firing "those who gave him inaccurate information".
The Geneva decision by the Palestinian Authority helped defer a vote that would have condemned Israel's non-cooperation with a war crimes investigation led by Richard Goldstone, and would also have sent his report to the Security Council.
The inquiry accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes in the conflict last December and January.
Israel had warned that the UN would deal a "fatal blow" to peace hopes if it endorsed Mr Goldstone's report, and the United States said its postponement would help re-launch negotiations between Mr Abbas and Israel, suspended since last November.
The diplomatic nuances were lost on many Palestinians, who saw the decision to shelve the report as a craven surrender by Mr Abbas to pressure from Washington. Some even alleged darkly that their president did it for personal benefit.
Abbas supporters are promising to fight back, beginning with a march in Ramallah tomorrow.