Tel Aviv, February 18: Israel on Thursday sought to play down a diplomatic row following the murder of a top Hamas official in Dubai by alleged Mossad assassination agents caught on camera and carrying European passports.
“There is no proof linking Israel to this affair,” a senior official said ahead of a meeting on Thursday to which the Foreign Office in London called in Israel’s ambassador.
The Israeli official, who asked not to be named, stressed that British authorities “have not summoned the ambassador but invited him for a discussion.”
On Thursday, extremist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman shrugged off suggestions that ties between Israel and Britain could be strained over the affair.
But this is not the first time Israel was involved in a passports’ row with Britain. In 1987, Tel Aviv had apologised to London over an apparent misconduct involving British passports.
Dublin has also called in the Israeli ambassador to Ireland.
The murder of Mahmud al-Mabhuh, a top officer of the democratically elected Palestinian movement Hamas, last month while on a trip to Dubai has widely been blamed on Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Dubai police have released the photos and names of 11 suspects with European passports — six from Britain, three from Ireland, one from Germany and one from France — alleged to have been members of the hit squad.
On Thursday, the Gulf emirate’s police chief insisted the passports were genuine.
In keeping with tradition, the secretive Mossad — which has used agents with fake foreign passports for such operations in the past — has kept mum on the affair.
The centre-right Maariv and the right-wing Israel Hayom newspapers both splashed the words “diplomatic crisis” on their front pages on Thursday, while the centre-left Haaretz highlighted the potential fallout for Israel.
“Dubai’s police investigation may present the Israeli government and intelligence with tough questions,” Haaretz said.
The newspaper also asked in an editorial whether it was “proper to place in harm’s way Israelis whose identities were ostensibly stolen and used by the assassins?”
But Yediot Aharonot, on the other hand, insisted: “If the facts are not revealed precisely, no severe diplomatic crisis will develop.”
In 1997, a diplomatic crisis erupted when Mossad agents disguised as Canadian tourists were arrested in Jordan after an attempt to kill senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman by injecting him with poison.
Meshaal fell into a coma and a furious King Hussein demanded Israel hand over the antidote if it wanted the captured agents to be freed.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then serving his first term as premier, was compelled to release Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and 19 others from prison to rescue fledgling diplomatic ties with Amman.
—Agencies