Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom said it is wrong to compare his country’s campaign against the Houthis in Yemen to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.

At an event hosted by the Labour Foreign Policy Group at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud said: “There isn't an equivalence between what Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon and the West Bank and what happened in Yemen.

“In Yemen, Saudi Arabia was supporting a democratically elected government with a UN mandate. Throughout the last 50 years, Israel has ignored every UN mandate,” Al-Saud claimed, before criticising the casualty figures in Gaza.

The general public’s reaction to Saudi Arabia’s decade-long war in Yemen has been insignificant compared to the non-stop anti-Israel protests seen on campuses and capitals around the world since October 7.

Over 41,000 people have been reportedly killed in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict started by Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7. However, the casualty figures come from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists.

According to a House of Commons report, 377,000 people are estimated to have been killed in Yemen between 2014-2021 both because of direct conflict and through starvation and disease caused indirectly by the fighting between the Saudi backed-coalition and the Iranian-backed Shia rebels.

NGOs and governments have raised concerns about human rights violations committed on all sides of the conflict. The Campaign Against Arms Trade claimed that: “Nearly 15,000 civilians have been killed by direct military action, most of them in air strikes by the Saudi-led Coalition.”

The ambassador denied that the British government’s decision to suspend 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel out of concerns they may be used to breach international humanitarian law (IHL) was a cause of concern for his government, despite being subject to similar criticism.

Al-Saud said: “The case for selling arms to Saudi went to a court, and the court judged that the robust mechanism the British government has functioned well. The same legal judgments are going the other way as far as Israel is concerned.”

In June 2019, a court of appeal ruled that arms sales to Saudi Arabia had been unlawful as ministers “made no concluded assessments of whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law”.

The following year, then-international trade secretary Liz Truss announced that the government would resume selling arms to the Saudis after the government revised its methodology to the arms export process.

She said at the time: “There is not a clear risk that the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia might be used in the commission of a serious violation of IHL”; Labour attacked the resumption of arms sales as “morally indefensible”.

When serving as shadow justice secretary in 2021, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that continuing to sell arms to Saudi Arabia was an example of then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s “failure of moral leadership” in a post on X/Twitter that is still available.

The ambassador said he hoped the UK government’s position on arms sales to Saudi Arabia based on legal advice would not change “because it means we've made the wrong decisions.”

The Saudi prince also said he thought “Israel suffered a major trauma on October 7” but that their response to the atrocities did not serve “the long-term strategic aims of the State of Israel”.

Prior to the war between Israel and Hamas, there had been a growing push towards normalisation of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration had been encouraging the development of formal ties between their two key regional allies who share a similar assessment of the threat posed to the region by Iran. 

The event the ambassador spoke at the launch of LFPG’s Middle East North Africa Forum, titled “From crisis to collaboration: can Britain be a force for good in the Middle East and North Africa?”

It also featured new Defence Minister Alistair Carns, former Pentagon Middle East adviser Jasmine El-Gamal and was chaired by LFPG’s co-founder Peymana Assad, who is also a councillor in the London Borough of Harrow.

During a wide-ranging discussion, Carns defended the government’s decision to suspend arms sales to Israel. He told the audience: “This was an exceptionally difficult leadership decision to make, but one that was balanced and intended to demonstrate the UK’s commitment to a cessation of hostilities on all sides as a vital way out of this conflict.”