JERUSALEM — The chief executive of a French telecommunications company made an extraordinary personal pilgrimage to Israel on Friday to apologize to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after the executive’s recent declaration that he wanted to disentangle from an Israeli mobile provider prompted a diplomatic uproar.

The executive, Stéphane Richard, the chairman of the French company Orange, said that his statement had been “distorted and misunderstood” as part of a growing movement to boycott companies that operate in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

As he had earlier, Mr. Richard said on Friday that the comment he made in Cairo last week, about wishing he could end Orange’s licensing agreement with Partner Communications of Israel “tomorrow morning,” was purely a business matter.

“I regret deeply this controversy, and I want to make totally clear that Orange as a company has never supported and will never support any kind of boycott against Israel,” Mr. Richard told Mr. Netanyahu on Friday. “Israel is a fantastic place to be in the digital industry, and, of course, our will is to strengthen and to keep on investing here.”