The Russian side “reaffirmed its firm commitment to the two-state principle” based on UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative, Moscow said.
Israel registered an official protest with Moscow on Thursday, after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with a Palestinian Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhala.
Israel’s interim Ambassador in Russia Eli Belocerkovsky told Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who also met with al-Nakhala on Wednesday night, that Islamic Jihad is a “terrorist organization supported by Iran that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and systematically undermines arrangements in the Gaza Strip by attacking Israeli civilians.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry website said the meeting between Lavrov and al-Nakhala focused mostly on the West Bank and Gaza and “the task of speedy restoration of Palestinian national unity on the political platform of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as a necessary condition for establishing sustainable direct negotiations with Israel.”
The Russian side “reaffirmed its firm commitment to the two-state principle” based on UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative, Moscow said.
The Russian Embassy to Israel tweeted photos of the meeting, including one in which the Lavrov and al-Nakhala are shown shaking hands and another of the delegations sitting around a table, but deleted the tweet soon after.
Asked about the deletion, the embassy’s spokesman said: “This topic concerns Russian Representative Office in Ramallah, and they have their own Twitter account.”
The 66-year-old Nakhalah spends most of his time moving between Lebanon and Syria, and has “excellent and strong” relations with Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.
Born in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip in 1953, the father of six was first arrested by Israel in 1971 for his membership in the Arab Liberation Forces, a terrorist group headed by Ziad al-Husseini. He was sentenced to life in prison – where he became fluent in Hebrew – but was released in a prisoner exchange agreement with Israel in 1985.
Nakhalah was again arrested by Israel in April 1988, a few months after the eruption of the First Intifada. He was deported to Lebanon in August that year, when he was appointed PIJ’s unofficial envoy to Beirut.
In 2014, Nakhalah led his group’s delegation to the negotiations with the Egyptians that ended the seven-week Operation Protective Edge in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. The operation came after Hamas fired rockets into Israel.
He was elected secretary-general of PIJ in April 2018.
Nakhalah is also believed to have been closely associated with Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force assassinated by the US earlier this year. According to some reports, Soleimani was in charge of providing PIJ and Hamas with financial and military aid.
As reported by The Jerusalem Post