Gaza, China takes the field for peace. Meeting with Hamas and anti-US strategy –

Xi Jinping’s China wants to step forward as a peace mediator. She has become increasingly vocal in her opposition to the war on Gaza. And it has also used the conflict as a platform to demonstrate its solidarity with the Arab world and the Global South, always ready to show itself in opposition to the United States. Although it is not clear how much space the Asian giant has to play a strong role in the region. This is how CNN reads the meeting last Sunday in Qatar between a Chinese diplomat and the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh. It is the first time since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza that Beijing has confirmed a face-to-face meeting of this kind. The protagonist with the political leader of Hamas was Wang Kejian, a Chinese diplomat who had already been to Israel and the West Bank, the first mission of this kind by an envoy from Beijing that we have heard of since the October 7 attack in Israel and the start of Israeli military operations in the Palestinian enclave.

Haniyeh and Wang, former ambassador to Lebanon, “had an exchange of views on the conflict in Gaza and other issues”, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing limited itself to announcing this morning. Present at the meeting, the Chinese ambassador to Qatar, Cao Xiaolin, highlights CNN underlining how Hamas claims to have had a meeting with Cao last month. During the face-to-face meeting with Wang, the group said that Haniyeh expressed appreciation for “China’s role in the Security Council, within the United Nations and at the International Court of Justice”. Haniyeh insisted on the “need to quickly stop the aggression and massacres”, on the request for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, reiterating the desire to “achieve the political objectives and aspirations for the creation of an independent Palestinian state”.

Wang has been in the region since at least March 10, when he met interlocutors in Egypt, before moving to the West Bank, then Israel and Qatar. A tour that had not been announced by Beijing, which after the October 7 attack in Israel had neither cited nor condemned Hamas and which since then has denounced the conflict and loudly supported the need for an immediate ceasefire and to implement the two-state solution. In the West Bank, in recent days, Wang met with the Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Riyad al-Maliki. Beijing insists on the two-state solution, a policy repeated by Beijing which however, as US TV observes, it is not clear how many possibilities it has of playing a strong role in support of an independent Palestinian state and which criticizes Israel for the conditions of the Palestinians while is in turn accused of human rights abuses against minorities, particularly in Xinjiang (accusations always rejected by the Asian giant).