Varsen Aghabekian Shahin, the minister of foreign affairs and expatriates of the Palestinian Authority and Indian PM Narendra Modi.
New Delhi: With Prime Minister Narendra Modi likely to visit Israel next month, Palestine wants India to play a greater role and help bring peace in West Asia.
“I think India is placed to venture into a role that brings both sides together,” Varsen Aghabekian Shahin, the minister of foreign affairs and expatriates of the Palestinian Authority, said in New Delhi. “India is a friend of Israel, and it's a friend of the Palestinians. It is committed to international law. India can play the role of a mediator between Israel and Palestine”.
Shahin is in New Delhi to join the foreign ministers of the other member nations of the League of Arab States in a meeting with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday. New Delhi is hosting the meeting 10 years after holding a similar conclave at Manama in 2016.
Even as Modi is likely to visit Tel Aviv on an invitation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next month, India is set to reiterate, in its engagement with the League of Arab States, its support for “a negotiated two-state solution” that would see the establishment of a sovereign, independent and viable State of Palestine within secure and recognised borders, living side by side in peace with Israel.
Shahin’s call to New Delhi to play the role of a mediator between Israel and Palestine came even as India recently refrained from showing up at a ceremony held in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22 for the signing of the charter of the ‘Board of Peace’, a body envisaged by United States President Donald Trump as a global peace-making platform, beginning with the Gaza Strip – the scene of Israel-Hamas conflict since October 2023 – but extending to other hotspots around the world too.
India, however, did laud the US at the United Nations Security Council for addressing the “long-standing issue” of conflict in Gaza. New Delhi’s envoy to the UN, Parvathaneni Harish, during an open debate at the UNSC on the situation in West Asia, noted recent progress in the implementation of the council’s Resolution 2803, adopted on November 17, 2025, to end the conflict in Gaza.
“The Board of Peace was discussed in a UN Security Council Resolution. We have embraced it because it stipulates what needs to be done in the second stage and simply the humanitarian assistance, the opening of the border crossings and in the final analysis, maybe taking us to the path of a sovereign Palestinian state and our right to self-determination. As such, we have embraced it,” said the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah in the West Bank.
Despite turning down an invitation from Trump to Modi to take part in the event at Davos, New Delhi, too, recently joined the European Union in noting the adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025, which welcomed the establishment of the Board of Peace and authorised an International Stabilisation Force, as outlined in the Comprehensive Plan, as a step forward to end the conflict in Gaza. India and the EU, however, encouraged all parties to implement the resolution in its entirety, in line with international law and relevant UNSC resolutions – thus tacitly advising Washington, D.C., against using the Board of Peace to bypass the international organisation or to project it as an alternative to the council.
Jaishankar and the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, will jointly chair the meeting with their counterparts in the League of Arab States member nations in New Delhi on Saturday.