The UK is prepared to defend British interests in the Middle East, the foreign secretary has said, as attacks between Israel and Iran continue.
David Lammy said the UK’s “force protection” in the region was at its highest level, after Iran vowed to respond to US strikes on its nuclear facilities.
In a statement to MPs, Lammy urged Iran to “dial this thing down” and negotiate with the US immediately.
The foreign secretary said the legality of the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear programme was a matter for the Trump administration and stressed the UK was not involved in the attack.
Lammy said Iran could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and stated the US had “taken action to alleviate that threat”.
But he did not explicitly say whether the UK government supported the US strikes in Iran, or whether he thought they complied with international law.
The two strands of his statement to MPs demonstrated the balancing act the government is performing on the international stage and in domestic politics.
“The situation presents serious risk to British interests in the region, having moved in additional assets on a precautionary basis, force protection is at its highest levels,” Lammy said in the House of Commons.
“Be in no doubt, we are prepared to defend our personnel, our assets and those of our allies and partners.”
Last week, the UK sent more military aircraft, including Typhoon jets and air-to-air refuelers, to the Middle East “for contingency support across the region”.
In his statement, Lammy said an RAF aircraft had evacuated 63 British nationals from Tel Aviv in Israel, to Cyprus, from where they will be taken to the UK, adding that more flights would follow.
He confirmed that one British national in Israel had been injured during Iranian missile attacks.
And he said the UK was warning British citizens in Qatar to shelter in place “until further notice”, after the US issued the same alert.
The BBC understands that there is “a credible threat” to the US-run Coalition Air Operations Centre at Al-Udaid in Qatar.
Lammy’s statement came after US President Donald Trump said American strikes had “totally obliterated” three Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday night.
The foreign secretary told MPs he was not able to give a clear assessment of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear programme and repeated his plea to resume negotiations.
He added: “Strikes cannot destroy the knowledge Iran has acquired over several decades, nor any regime ambition to deploy that knowledge to build a nuclear weapon.”
Lammy and other ministers have been focusing their efforts on de-escalating the situation through diplomatic means.
Earlier he told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it would be a “catastrophic mistake” for Iran to retaliate by firing at US bases, or by blockading the key shipping lane of the Strait of Hormuz.
But the government’s failure to clearly state whether they support the American and Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites has been pounced on by opposition parties.
Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel said the Labour government had “tried to hide and obfuscate on whether or not they support the US’ action”.
She said “the British public deserve to know if their government supports degrading the threat of Iran to us and our allies, or whether it is all too happy to sit on the moral fence”.
The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller tried to pull Lammy in the other direction.
He accused the US and Israel of adopting a “might is right” approach that he said undermined the international rules-based order and risked a “full-scale regional war”.