Palestinian parties met for talks in Beijing

China said on Tuesday that rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah met in Beijing recently for “in-depth and candid talks on promoting intra-palestinian reconciliation”.

“Representatives of the

Palestine National Liberation Movement and the Islamic Resistance Movement recently came to Beijing,” foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said, referring to the groups by their formal names. “The two sides fully expressed their political will to achieve reconciliation through dialogue and consultation, discussed many specific issues and made positive progress,” he added, without specifying when the sides had met.

Beijing has been calling for an immediate ceasefire since the start of the current war in October last year, when attacks by the Palestinian groups resulted in the deaths of about 1,170 people in Israel, according to a tally based on Israeli official figures. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,535 people in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children, the health ministry in the territory said on Tuesday.

Beijing said on Tuesday the two factions had “agreed to continue this process of dialogue with a view to achieving Palestinian unity at an early date”.

“The two sides highly appreciated China’s firm support for the just cause of the

Palestinian people to restore their legitimate national rights,” Lin said.

He did not identify the representatives from the rivals who met in Beijing.

But one analyst said that, in contrast to Western efforts to sideline the groups, Beijing’s “strategic objective is to legitimise them as a political faction”.

“Palestinian unity, in Beijing’s view, is the first and necessary step for a peace process that leads to a Palestinian state,” Ahmed Aboudouh, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, said.

“Most importantly, China wants to keep the momentum of positive discourse about its role in the Middle East,” he added.

China has historically been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and supportive of a twostate solution to the Israelipalestinian conflict.