JERUSALEM — Former British prime minister Tony Blair is standing down as the Quartet representative in the Middle East, the organization said on Wednesday, after eight years struggling to break ground in peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians.

Officials close to the Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia, said Blair, 62, would continue to play an informal role in trying to forge a two-state solution between the Palestinians and Israel.

Blair tried to pull together the strands of diplomacy between Washington, Brussels, New York and Moscow as a high-profile go-between. But Blair failed to gain the full trust of either the Palestinians or Israel, which has always kept its closest contacts with the United States via the secretary of state.

This left Blair waging an uphill battle to find any substantive common ground between the sides.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Blair had “made great efforts to advance stability in the region” helping to bridge Israeli, Palestinians gaps “in times of crisis.”

Former Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, an ultranationalist, praised Blair as a “true friend of Israel.”

Senior Palestinian official, Hanan Ashrawi, was dismissive of Blair. She said he had a minimal impact on Quartet diplomacy and shown “bias toward the Israeli side.

“He had no rules except to sometimes listen to what Netanyahu had to say,” Ashrawi said.