ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday that Islamabad does not recognize Israel while responding to a question about the inclusion of the Jewish state in a list prepared by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) which was released last week and mentions the names of countries whose citizens need to go through special checks in order to visit the country.

“Pakistan doesn’t recognize Israel,” Foreign Office Spokesperson Dr. Mohammad Faisal said without giving any further details about the FIA’s list.

Asked if the inclusion of Israel in the list reflected a change in the country’s foreign policy, he parried the question and advised to contact the Ministry of Interior for further details.

The FIA had published a list of seven countries, including Israel, whose citizens would need to undergo special police registration if they visited Pakistan. Other countries named on the list were India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Palestine.

The appearance of the list on the FIA’s website immediately elicited a reaction from social media users and the general public, as Pakistan does not recognize Israel and there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries.

FIA’s director of immigrations, Ismatullah Junejo, told Arab News on Tuesday that the list was drawn up three years ago and had been “mistakenly” uploaded on the website during the digitization of records. He added that the list had been removed from the FIA’s website on January 1.

In October last year, a controversy pertaining to the landing of an “Israeli plane” in Pakistan led to a media uproar and a near-crisis for Prime Minister Imran Khan’s new administration. The government ministers later rebutted the reports as “fake.”

During the weekly press briefing, Dr. Faisal also highlighted atrocities in Indian-administered Kashmir and the consistent violation of the Line of Control (LoC) – the de facto border separating the two South Asian nuclear neighbors in the Kashmir region – by firing on civilians on the Pakistani side.

Dr. Faisal said that his ministry has lodged a protest with the acting Indian deputy high commissioner in Islamabad over the repeated ceasefire violations.

He also urged India to allow the United Nations Observers Mission to visit the LoC to record the incidents, while condemning the violation of Pakistan’s airspace by Indian spy drones in the past two days.

“Pakistani forces are alert and both Indian drones were shot down,” he said even as he denied that any ‘surgical strikes’ had been conducted by India in the Pakistani territory. “The surgical strikes never occurred and Indian media has also negated their government’s claims of the strikes,” he added.

“Pakistan wants to resolve all its outstanding issues with India through dialogue, but the latter is running away from negotiations,” he said.

Talking about peace in Afghanistan, Dr. Faisal said that Pakistan would continue its efforts, along with Russia and China, for a negotiated settlement of the 17-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.

“Peace in Afghanistan is crucial for the stability and prosperity of the whole region,” he said.

However, he urged the Afghan government to investigate how Aslam alias Achu, who mastermind the attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi last November, was living on the Afghan soil. Achu was reportedly killed in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in a recent suicide bombing.

“Afghanistan had assured us that its land will never be used against Pakistan,” Dr. Faisal said.