Norwegian State Secretary Andreas Kravik has admitted that it was a mistake not to allow the King to express condolences to Israel after October 7.
Two days after the Hamas massacre, the royal family contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked if Norway could send a personal condolence. Foreign Affairs Minister Espen Barth Eide advised King Harald V not to. While the reasoning was that “it is considered natural that any condolences in the present case come from the government,” the majority of the Jewish community looks on this incident as a betrayal. It also took Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre four days to refer to Hamas as a terrorist group.
Rolf Kirschner, the former leader of the Jewish community of Oslo, told The Jerusalem Post last year that the incident was “a stain on Norwegian history.”
However, there may now finally be an apology - over two and a half years later.
On April 22, Kravik appeared as a guest on the show of Jewish Norwegian podcaster Henrik Beckheim.
Beckheim probed Kravik on the double standards of the King not being allowed to condole Israel after 7 October, whereas he was allowed to send condolences to Christ Church after the mass shootings in 2019, after the Manchester bombing in 2017, and after the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, in 2024. He was permitted to also send messages after Stockholm, Brussels, Istanbul, Nice, Paris, and London (all locations of high-casualty terrorist attacks between 2015 and 2017) he was allowed.
Kravik said he believed the issue stemmed from the 'division of labor' where the King typically sends condolences in cases of natural disasters and the Prime Minister or the Minister of Foreign Affairs are in charge of sending condolences following political acts or acts of terror.
The response would have been handled differently today
He acknowledged that some people were upset about this, and said they "would have obviously handled it differently today."
"This is something we would not have repeated if the situation had arisen today," he reiterated.
He did stress that Norway, from the start, was "very clear about not only condemning the terrorist attack from Hamas, which was enormously bestial, and also expressed compassion and empathy and sorrow for what Israel was hit by, so I think the Israeli authorities and the Israeli population know very well where Norway stands in that situation."
"I understand, Henrik, the point that you raise there looks like a kind of bias treatment, and we cannot be associated with that. That is why we have gone through all our routines to look at things so that something like this won't happen again."