Tony Blair’s government accused Israeli forces of acting more like the “Russian army than that of a civilised country” during a major military incursion into the occupied West Bank, newly released official files show.

The tensions, which have eerie parallels to western concerns over current Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip, are laid bare in papers released by the National Archives.

The documents show the exasperation of western allies at the mounting Palestinian death toll as the Israel Defense Forces laid siege to the headquarters of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, in 2002.

“If some of the reports we were receiving were credible, the IDF’s behaviour was more worthy of the Russian army than that of a supposedly civilised country,” Cowper-Coles told the adviser, according to his report of the meeting.