The question of how Israel will respond to Iran’s attack dominated David Cameron’s first broadcast round since he became Foreign Secretary last year. Immediately condemning Iran’s attack as a ‘very, very dangerous act in an already dangerous world’ on BBC Breakfast, Cameron added that ‘fortunately, it was a failure’. The Foreign Secretary told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that ‘Iran has suffered a double defeat: a defeat because they’ve failed, but a second defeat because the world can now see that they are the malign influence in the region’. But it’s not Iran that Israel should be focusing on now, Cameron believes:

They have every right to respond and you’d understand that as an Israeli citizen, you’d be thinking ‘my country came under attack, we must respond’. We’re asking them as their friends to think with head as well as heart, to be smart as well as tough, to recognise Iran has failed and the best way to de-escalate the situation is not to attack back but instead to focus on Hamas’s failure to release the hostages and the failure to agree to a pause in the fighting in Gaza, because we badly need to get aid in there and get the hostages home.

‘Our advice is: don’t retaliate,’ Cameron told the BBC, reiterating the words of US president Joe Biden that Israel should ‘take the win’ of a failed attack and refocus on defeating Hamas. Yet American journalists were informed by Israeli sources on Sunday that Israel’s response would come in the next two days. Cameron’s thoughts? ‘We wouldn’t be supporting retaliatory action,’ he said firmly.

‘We are urging them to think with head as well as heart, to be smart as well as tough,’ the Foreign Secretary told the BBC’s Today programme. ‘The right thing to do is not to escalate.’

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