Several social media users were “shocked” on Thursday after the Foreign Office amended its statement on the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the chief of the Political Bureau of Hamas.

Ismail was killed in Tehran on July 31 in an attack attributed to Israel. Pakistan joined the Islamic world and condemned the killing and stated that the act constituted a dangerous escalation in the region.

But the FO’s post on its social media platform X baffled several people after it deleted the first statement and posted a new one with a slight change, grabbing the attention of social media users.

The amended statement did not “Israel” before the word adventurism in the last paragraph of the statement like it was mentioned in the initial one.

Some people questioned the country’s foreign policy after the development.

“Apart from being poorly drafted with no mention of Genocide in Gaza, Israel rogue behaviour and Palestine conflict being at the center of the crisis. MOFA has released a revised the press release; ‘Israeli adventurism’ to ‘adventurism’,” said one of the users on X. His post garnered more than 23,000 views.

Statement first uploaded on X

Edited statement

Press briefing

A question related to the development was raised in the weekly press briefing on Thursday.

“Yesterday, the Foreign Office had released a statement initially, which referred to Israeli adventurism in context of the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the chief of Hamas’ political bureau. Hours later, the statement was quietly amended, and the word Israeli adventurism was omitted,” Anas Mallick, a journalist from Capital TV said.

He asked if Pakistan did not believe it was Israeli adventurism. And if it doesn’t, then what adventurism and whose adventurism is it referring to? Is it the region, Pakistan, Iran’s neighbours, or Afghanistan? I mean, who particularly and what caused this omission?

“My first comment to your question is that our public statements correspond to the developments that take place internationally, especially in cases where the developments are taking place at fast pace and new information is coming in. That is a general statement that I wanted to make,” FO spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch replied.

With regards to Haniyeh’s killing in Iran, she said: “I just made a comprehensive statement on the incident. We have condemned the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh. We have extended our condolences to his family and to the people of Palestine in our statement. We also condemn Israel adventurism in the region and the acts that it is taking against its neighbours, including the attack against Lebanon on the 30th of June.”

She went on to add that Pakistan believed that all such acts, including the “genocide that is taking place in Gaza,” were dangerous developments for the region. “We also believe that Israel should be held to account for its war crimes in Gaza and occupied Palestinian territories.”