Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has retracted the claim he made last week in the European Parliament that rabbis had called for the poisoning of West Bank wells.

In his speech in Brussels, President Abbas said that "only a week ago, a number of rabbis in Israel announced, and made a clear announcement, demanding that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians." The accusation, which appears to be based on unsubstantiated reports on the internet, was condemned by the Israeli government for "spreading a blood libel".

Over the weekend, the Palestine Liberation Organisation published a retraction, which said: "After it has become evident that the alleged statements by a rabbi on poisoning Palestinian wells… are baseless, President Mahmoud Abbas has affirmed that he did not intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world."

During his visit to Brussels, Mr Abbas also rejected a European proposal to meet Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who was there at the same time. His delegation went so far as to change their hotel so as not to chance on Mr Rivlin, who was staying there as well.

Mr Abbas has a chequered record on Jewish-related issues. Last year, he accused Israelis of "defiling" the Al Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount. In the early 1980s, he published a book on "the connection between the Nazis and the leaders of the Zionist movement", in which he wrote that the Holocaust as it is presented is a myth perpetuated by the Nazis and the Zionists. He has since retracted these claims, saying that they were made in the years in which Israel was an enemy, and that the Holocaust cannot be denied. He has, however, returned relatively recently to accusations of ties between Nazis and Zionists.

Whether or not his speech to the European Parliament was another foray into that kind of discourse, Mr Abbas's much tougher stance is a sign of both his attempts to play to a deeply dissatisfied Palestinian public and a clear strategic shift towards trying to involve the international community in the conflict with Israel.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Mr Abbas "once again proved to the entire world that he is not interested in direct negotiations with Israel. Worse, he also spread lies about the state of Israel and Judaism. True, he quickly apologised, a half-hearted half-apology, but the things he said there were in keeping with what he has said about us on other occasions".