A few hours after Israel launched the 24-hour ultimatum to evacuate one million people in northern GazaMore than 7,000 kilometers away, in Beijing, an Israeli diplomat was stabbed on a street in the Chaoyang district, in the center of the Chinese capital.
More details of the incident have barely emerged, but several videos quickly circulated on Chinese social networks in which a man dressed in white is seen attacking the Israeli with a knife.
In another shot, the victim appears bloodied on the ground surrounded by police and with another foreigner at his side shouting for an ambulance. It was the Israeli embassy that confirmed that the man was a worker in its delegation, adding that he was stable and that he was being treated in a hospital.
In one of the videos, a woman passing by the scene can be heard saying in Mandarin that the attack must have been due to Israel’s bloody incursion into Gaza after the Hamas attack. In China, public opinion is focused on Palestine. On Weibo, the Chinese brother of Twitter (now X), there are many comments that justify the Islamist group’s offensive by citing that Israel has been drowning and murdering the Palestinian people for years.
At the political level, as happened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Government of Xi Jinpingwhich has always publicly supported the Palestinian cause, even defending at the UN that the solution to the conflict involves the creation of a sovereign Palestinian State, emerged from the beginning as a “neutral” actor in the war that has broken out in a region where Beijing has been trying to extend its influence for some time.