Arab League chief heads to Moscow for talks after Hamas attack on Israel

Arab League Chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit headed to Moscow on Sunday for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the situation in Gaza after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched the biggest attack on Israel in years.

Aboul Gheit, who served as Egypt’s foreign minister during the final seven years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, will discuss the “ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip,” said a spokesman for the Cairo-based league of Arab states.

After Hamas’s attack on Saturday, Russia expressed grave concern, calling on both Palestinian and Israeli sides to cease violence and blamed the West for blocking the Middle East Quartet.

Moscow said that a proper negotiation was necessary to provide for the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the borders of 1967 with a capital in East Jerusalem.

“We regard the current large-scale escalation as another extremely dangerous manifestation of a vicious circle of violence resulting from chronic failure to comply with the corresponding resolutions of the UN and its Security Council and the blocking by the West of the work of the Middle East Quartet of international mediators made up of Russia, the United States, the EU and the UN,” Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.