Israel's ambassador to Oslo said on Tuesday the media had twisted her remarks about the Norwegian monarchy into criticism for a lack of public sympathy after a shooting at Oslo's synagogue.

Norway's foreign minister had called Ambassador Miryam Shomrat's original televised comments "unsuitable" and the Jewish community had distanced itself from her.

Norway reprimanded Shomrat on Tuesday after she criticized Norway's royal family for failing to express sympathy with the Jewish community over a shooting at Oslo's synagogue.

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"At no time did I intend to criticise nor did I criticize their majesties King Harald and Queen Sonja or the royal family," Shomrat said in a statement.

Shomrat said she felt "great dismay" that the media had presented some of her comments as criticisms of the king for failing to show solidarity with the Jewish community after gunmen shot at the Oslo synagogue on Sept. 17.

The royal family in this democratic Scandinavian country is rarely criticized, even by Norwegians.

In an interview with public television aired late on Monday, Ambassador Miryam Shomrat said: "I think a gesture from the royal household to the Jewish community on the eve of the New Year would have been in place anyway, certainly a show of solidarity after the shooting incident would have been in place.

"Forgive me for saying it so openly, but I do think it is a very important gesture which should be taken," she added.

Norwegian police have caught four men suspected of shooting Oslo's only synagogue full of holes during an early morning raid on September 17, in which nobody was injured.

The incident was the worst in a series of attacks on Norway's small Jewish community in recent months.

"In the first place an ambassador from another country ought to know that the Royal Family can never respond to such remarks," Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said.

"And anyway she should also know that it is the government that expresses the view of the Norwegian authorities," he added.

"What she is doing is to make criticisms of something that must be interpreted as a lack of sympathy with what happened last week," Gahr Stoere said. "I think this is an unsuitable remark for an ambassador from another country in Norway."

Anne Sender, leader of the Mosaic Religious Community which owns the synagogue, rushed to distance herself from the ambassador's comments.

"She can of course say what she wants, but she cannot talk on our behalf," Sender told daily Aftenposten. "We would never have dreamed of taking a stand against the royal family."

Norway's King Harald V presides over the country's parliamentary democracy, signing bills into law and hosting foreign heads of state, but rarely comments on current affairs.

Shomrat also slammed former Norwegian Prime Minister Kaare Willoch and Jostein Gaarder, the author of "Sophie's World", a novel and teenagers' guide to philosophy that has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.

Gaarder enraged Israelis by writing a newspaper column some weeks ago questioning whether Israel had forfeited its right to exist with the war in Lebanon. Shomrat accused Willoch, a critic of the war, of spreading half-truths.