Israeli President Isaac Herzog reached out to China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of Thursday’s session of the Seventh Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia. Herzog, according to Xinhua, recalled that the two peoples helped each other during the World Anti-Fascist War, a memorable chapter in history.

Wang acknowledged that during World War II, both the Chinese and Israeli peoples suffered greatly from the ravages of war, and extended a helping hand to each other in times of hardship, giving rise to many moving stories. But in China’s promotion of peace and reconciliation in the Middle East, as Xinhua put it, “China has consistently maintained that the Palestinian question is the greatest historical injustice of this century and that the two-state solution is the right way to resolve the question... [T]he current top priority is to open full access to the Gaza Strip. The two million civilians there must not be left struggling on the brink of survival, nor should the humanitarian catastrophe be allowed to continue spreading; Israel should halt and reverse the forced establishment of settlements in the West Bank.”