Israel has accused the House of Commons’ influential Foreign Affairs Select Committee of creating a “false equivalence” between it and Iran.
Yesterday, an urgent session of the committee convened to hear from Iran’s ambassador to the UK on the conflict between the two countries.
The committee’s chair, Dame Emily Thornberry, said in a post on X that Israel’s ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely was “unavailable when we invited her”.
“We hope to hear from Israeli voices at a later session”, the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury added.
However, a spokesperson for Israel’s embassy forcefully rejected the seeming pairing of Israel and Iran as equivalents by the committee.
“Israel has been fighting for the last 5 days an existential threat posed by the Iranian regime. The only obligation of its diplomats is to its own government and its own parliament”, a spokesperson for Israel’s embassy told the JC exclusively.
They continued: “We are disappointed in the false equivalence made by the Foreign Affairs Committee today when inviting the Israeli ambassador to testify alongside a representative from a country that openly expresses their intentions to annihilate us.
“The Iranian regime is an anti-democratic, misogynistic, and theocratic regime that funds terror groups across our entire region, sewing instability not only in the Middle East but also on European and British soil. This Iranian regime stands for everything that we in Israel and the UK oppose.”
Speaking before the committee yesterday Iran’s ambassador Seyed Ali Mousavi accused Israel of violating the “UN Charter and fundamental principles of the international law”.
In a lengthy statement, he also claimed that “Iran has not attacked Israel. Iran has not started any war. So, the so-called existential threat narrative is false”.
Questioned by Thornberry on the Iranian regime’s alleged support for terrorist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Mousavi denied that they were Iranian proxies, and appeared to call Hamas a liberation movement.
“They are their own nations, Yemeni people, Palestinian people, the Hamas people, all of them. They’re liberation organisations. They are trying to, you know, to achieve the self-determination to punish the occupiers,” he said.
The ambassador was also pressed on the threats posed by the regime to Britain’s Jewish community.
Labour MP for East Renfrewshire Blair McDougall asked Mousavi: “The director general of MI5 identified a number of plots backed by Iran in this country. Including lethal threats against Iranian dissidents and against Jewish communities here. How many plots had he identified in the last three years?”.
Mousavi went on to confirm that 22 such plots had been identified by the agency, but said: “Let me answer to you. First of all, let me, it's very important please correct your wording that the Iranian government is a lawful and very important and significant and respectful government.”
And he was also questioned about the regime’s human rights record towards its own civilians.
Labour MP Dan Carden told the committee that “any attempt to get to diplomatic outcome is going to require trust on all sides, and trust is something that the Iranian regime simply doesn't have”.
He continued: “You talked in your opening remarks about international law, you talked about the loss of civilian life. And I wanted to ask you about reports that the Iranian regime itself … has murdered over over 1000 of its citizens in 2024”.
Mousavi had attempted to interrupt Carden to object to the use of the phrase “Iranian regime”, and urged him to use “Iranian government" instead, before Carden asked him: “Do you know how many of your own citizens the Iranian regime has murdered this year in 2025”?
The ambassador claimed that the Liverpool Walton MP’s question was “based on misunderstanding and misperceptions”.
Also yesterday, amid speculation that the US may soon join Israel in attacking Iran, Sir Keir Starmer repeated calls for regional de-escalation.
Speaking to ITV News’ Robert Peston from the G7 summit of world leaders in Canada, the prime minister pointed to a joint statement by G7 leaders, including US President Donald Trump, which called for "de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, including a ceasefire in Gaza"
It also labelled Iran “the principal source of regional instability and terror” and emphasised that “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”
“We sat here last night for the best part of two hours with the President, put out a G7 statement very shortly afterwards. Which was clear about the nuclear threat in relation to Iran, absolutely clear about Israel's right to self-defence and also the need to de-escalate across the region, including in Gaza, which obviously is linked to the conflict. That statement really, I think speaks for itself”, Starmer said.
