British Foreign Minister William Hague on Tuesday criticized the Islamic movement Hamas for mourning Osama bin Laden's death.
After the Al-Qaeda chief was killed by US forces in Pakistan , the head of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniya, said: "We condemn any killing of a holy warrior or of a Muslim and Arab person and we ask God to bestow his mercy upon him."
Speaking a day before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Britain for talks, Hague told parliament that he believed unity in welcoming the killing would help the stalled Middle East peace process.
Hague said: "It would assist that cause if it was possible to show across many different divides in the world a good deal of unity about what happened on Sunday night and the removal of the author of some of the world's greatest terrorist acts from the scene.
"It would have been better for Hamas to join the welcome to that. That would have been a boost in itself to the peace process."
Netanyahu will hold talks with Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday and is expected to point to a reconciliation deal between Hamas and the Western-backed Fatah in his efforts to block UN recognition of a Palestinian state in September.
Israel opposes the unilateral Palestinian move because it bypasses negotiations, ignoring the need to resolve key issues for a two-state solution such as borders and security arrangements.
Britain signaled last week it would back the PA’s independent path to statehood as a means to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Netanyahu on Tuesday called on Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to "completely cancel" the reconciliation deal with Hamas that was signed in Cairo earlier in the day, and warned it was a "hard blow" to the peace process. He will deliver the message during his visit in London.
Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip from Abbas's Fatah movement in 2007 after bloody combats, calls for Israel's destruction in its founding charter.
On the same trip, Netanyahu will also visit Paris on Thursday for similar talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy told L'Express weekly magazine that he will push for the launch of a new Israeli-Palestinian peace process before Palestinian leaders ask the UN General Assembly in September to recognize statehood.
"We are going to take an initiative before the summer, with the Europeans, to restart, along with the Americans, the peace process," he said.
"France wants the peace process to be restarted before the difficult UN meeting in September."
Sarkozy said he hoped he would hear Netanyahu back the Palestinians' right to statehood.
"All my life I've been a friend of Israel, but there will be no security for Israel without a viable, democratic and modern Palestinian state."
At the end of May, Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress in Washington.