China says Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah met for talks in Beijing

BEIJING (AFP) : China said 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.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after ferocious fighting with its rivals in Fatah, which maintains partial administrative control in the Israeli-occupied West Bank through the Palestinian Authority.

China has historically been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and supportive of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Beijing has been calling for an immediate ceasefire since the start of the current Israel-Hamas war in October last year, when attacks by the militant group resulted in the deaths of about 1,170 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,488 people in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the territory.

That tally includes at least 34 deaths in a 24-hour window, the ministry said Monday, down from a peak this month of at least 153 deaths on April 9.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for an “international peace conference” to resolve the fighting.