BEIJING: China’s foreign minister has told his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts that Beijing is ready to help facilitate peace talks, state media Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

The separate phone calls between Foreign Minister Qin Gang and the Israeli and the Palestinian top diplomats come amid recent moves by Beijing to position itself as a regional mediator.

Qin encouraged “steps to resume peace talks”, and said that “China is ready to provide convenience for this,” in a Monday phone call with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, Xinhua reported in a summarisation.

And Qin told Palestinian foreign minister Riyad Al-Maliki that Beijing supports the resumption of talks as soon as possible, according to a Xinhua summary that also mentions that in both calls, China’s push for peace talks was emphasised on the basis of implementing a ‘two-state solution’.

Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have been stalled since 2014.

China has been making diplomatic efforts to broker the restoration of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia — rivals in a region, where the United States has been the main diplomatic powerbroker for decades.

The Saudi-Iran deal was struck after a seven-year diplomatic rupture. Host­ility between the two powers had endangered stability in the Middle East and fuelled conflict in Yemen.

Asked whether the Saudi-Iran deal might fray, Wang Di, a Chinese diplomat involved in the talks in Beijing, told reporters the rapprochement was a process without expectations that all issues would be solved overnight. “The important thing is for both sides to have the sincerity to improve ties,” he said, according to Xinhua.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2023