Palestinians search for victims at the site of an Israeli raid on a house during the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023. Photograph: Muhammad Salem/Reuters. Obtaining licensing rights
BEIJING (Reuters) – The Chinese special envoy to the Middle East attributed the cause of the crisis between Israel and Gaza to the lack of guarantees for Palestinian rights during his meeting with his Russian counterpart in Qatar, which plays the role of mediator in the conflict.
In the first stop of his tour in the region, Chinese envoy for Middle Eastern issues Zhai Jun arrived in Qatar on Thursday, where he reaffirmed with his Russian counterpart Mikhail Bogdanov that Beijing stands alongside Moscow in their efforts to help calm the Gaza crisis.
China and Russia have the same position on the Palestinian issue, Zhai was quoted as saying after his meeting with Bogdanov in Doha, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with President Xi Jinping in a rare meeting in Beijing.
“The fundamental reason for the current situation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the failure to guarantee the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people,” Zhai said, without referring to the armed Hamas movement in Gaza.
On October 7, Hamas militants stormed southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing at least 1,400 people. In response, Israel responded with air strikes, putting the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents under siege.
A week later, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang YiWhile he condemned “all actions that harm civilians” without mentioning Hamas by name, he declared that “Israel’s actions went beyond the scope of self-defense.”
Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, told Bloomberg TV on Thursday that the United States and China have different views on the war between Israel and Hamas.
“We do not have identical views on this particular situation,” Burns said in response to a question about whether he saw the tensions in the Middle East as an opportunity to improve Sino-American relations.
‘Root causes’
The crisis has placed China and Russia in separate camps from the United States. President Joe Biden said he would seek additional funding, estimated at billions, to help Israel fight Hamas.
Russia, which has relations with Iran, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and major Arab powers as well as with the Palestinians and Israel, has repeatedly said that the United States and the West have ignored the need to establish an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
A draft resolution drafted by Brazil at the UN Security Council calling for a humanitarian ceasefire failed on Wednesday, with the United States vetoing the resolution. A draft resolution drafted by Russia calling for a humanitarian ceasefire also failed on Monday.
“The biased position of the United States is one of the root causes of the long-standing Palestinian issue, and serves as an incentive to escalate the conflict when it breaks out,” Chinese nationalist newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial.
In Qatar, Zhai said that China is ready to maintain communications and coordination with Russia in an attempt to calm the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The small Gulf state of Qatar has been an essential stop for foreign diplomats, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has sought to mediate the conflict between Israel and Gaza in recent days, and has direct channels of communication with Hamas, which has had a political office in Doha for more than Two years. From a decade ago.
(Reporting by Liz Lee and Ryan Wu – Prepared by Mohammed for the Arabic Bulletin) Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Stephen Coates, Lincoln Feast and Miral Fahmy
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