Qatar seeks

in favor and no vetoes.

Efforts by Kuwait to mediate in the dispute have so far yielded little progress.

The boycotting countries want Qatar to cut back ties with Iran, close a Turkish military base in Qatar and shut the Al-Jazeera TV channel.

“We want to solve this issue by dialogue and we are not willing to escalate and they need to retreat from all their legal actions,” said Al-Thani, who also met with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Washington on Wednesday.

The Qatar crisis is now at a “standstill”, said US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert late Thursday.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met on Wednesday with Qatar’s Foreign Minister, where they “talked a lot about the situation as it unfolds there,” Nauert told reporters.

She added, “We believe now that the dispute is at a standstill.

“We’ve gone between periods where we have said that it is at impasse, at one point, and then there was some movement ... Well, now it appears to be at standstill,” she noted.

Foreign ministers from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt will meet in Manama on Sunday, the Bahraini Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

The four ministers agreed in Cairo on July 5 to meet again in Manama by the end of the month, the ministry added in a statement.

They had met in Cairo to discuss Qatar’s response to a list of demands submitted by the four states, through His Highness the Amir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber AlSabah.

In a joint statement after the meeting, they said Doha’s response to the demands was “generally negative,” and thanked His Highness the Amir for his efforts to solve the row with Qatar.

Qatar refuses to bow to Saudi-led demands to “outsource” its foreign policy to resolve the Gulf crisis, its government spokesman told AFP in an interview.

Sheikh Saif bin Ahmed Al-Thani, who holds ministerial rank, accused Doha’s adversaries in the crisis — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt — of meddling in Qatar’s internal affairs.