France and China call for Palestinian state

Israel strongly opposes the plan despite support from many world powers, including the US.

China and France have called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, according to a joint statement issued during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s two-day official visit with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris.

The so-called two-state solution, a plan to create a Palestinian state within territory occupied by Israel since 1967, is supported by the UN and a raft of individual nations, including Israel’s key ally the US. If implemented, it would likely require the Jewish state to remove its settlers from the occupied territories.

Macron and Xi have called for “a decisive and irreversible relaunch of a political process” to implement “the two-state solution with Jerusalem as their capital, and the creation of a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 lines,” the joint statement reads.