Rupert Murdoch has apologised for a Sunday Times cartoon depicting the Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu building a wall using blood-red mortar, an image Jewish leaders said was reminiscent of antisemitic propaganda.

The cartoon, published on Holocaust Memorial Day, shows Netanyahu wielding a long, sharp trowel and depicts agonised Palestinians bricked into the wall's structure. It was meant as a comment on recent elections in which Netanyahu's party narrowly won the most seats in the Israeli parliamentary elections.

"Will cementing the peace continue?" the caption read, a reference both to the stalled peace process and Israel's separation barrier, a complex of fences and concrete walls, which Israel portrays as a defence against suicide bombers but which Palestinians say is a land grab under the guise of security.

Murdoch wrote on Twitter that the cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe – a veteran who frequently depicts blood in his work – did not reflect the paper's editorial line. "Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon," Murdoch tweeted.

Jewish community leaders were particularly disturbed by parallels they saw between the red-tinged drawing and historical antisemitic propaganda – in particular the theme of "blood libel", the twisted but persistent myth that Jews secretly use human blood in their religious rituals.

Their anger was heightened by the fact that the cartoon was published on a day meant to commemorate the communities destroyed by the Nazis and their allies in the mid-20th century.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which represents the country's roughly 265,000-strong Jewish community, said it had lodged a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission.

The deputies said in a statement that the depiction of a Jewish leader using blood for mortar "is shockingly reminiscent of the blood-libel imagery more usually found in parts of the virulently antisemitic Arab press." Israel's ambassador to Britain echoed the statement, while the speaker of Israel's parliament, Reuven Rivlin, wrote to his UK counterpart to express "extreme outrage".

Murdoch's News International, which publishes the Times, said Scarfe was not available for comment.

In a statement, the paper's acting editor, Martin Ivens, said that insulting the memory of Holocaust victims or invoking blood libel was "the last thing I or anyone connected with the Sunday Times would countenance".

"The paper has long written strongly in defence of Israel and its security concerns, as have I as a columnist," Ivens said. "We are, however, reminded of the sensitivities in this area by the reaction to the cartoon, and I will of course bear them very carefully in mind in future."

Scarfe, whose career with the Sunday Times stretches back to the 1960s, often makes use of images of blood in his cartoons. The red fluid is splashed across his website and featured, for example, in a recent cartoon of the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who was pictured as a green, wraith-like creature drinking greedily from an oversized cup labelled "Children's Blood".