<div style="text-align: justify; "><b><span style="font-size: 1rem;">China said today that rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah met in Beijing recently for “in-depth and candid talks on promoting intra-Palestinian reconciliation”.</span><br></b></div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">“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.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“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.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Islamist movement 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.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">China has historically been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and supportive of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">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 group resulted in the deaths of about 1,170 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">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 Hamas-run territory.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That tally includes at least 34 deaths in a 24-hour window, the ministry said yesterday, down from a peak this month of at least 153 deaths on April 9, reports AFP&nbsp;</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Chinese president Xi Jinping has called for an “international peace conference” to resolve the fighting.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd/fas</div>