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Not less than 30 legal experts have called on the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to bar Israel and its clubs from competitions over its alleged atrocities in Gaza.
The letter, addressed to UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin on Thursday, said banning Israel is “imperative”, citing a report by United Nations investigators that confirmed Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians.
It urged the football governing body and its members to “fulfil their legal and moral obligations to uphold international law, and move forward with an immediate and complete ban of Israeli football”.
The letter highlighted the damage that Israel is inflicting on the sport in Gaza, noting that at least 421 Palestinian footballers have been killed since Israel began its military offensive in October 2023.
The letter explained that Israel’s bombing campaign is “systematically destroying Gaza’s football infrastructure”.
“These acts have decimated an entire generation of athletes, eroding the fabric of Palestinian sport,” it read.
“The failure of the Israel Football Association (IFA) to challenge these violations implicates it in this system of oppression, rendering its participation in UEFA competitions untenable.”
The letter’s signatories included Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, the executive director of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, as well as several former UN experts and scholars in international law.
“UEFA must not be complicit in sports-washing such flagrant breaches of international law, including but not limited to the act of genocide,” the statement said.
It comes amid growing international outrage at Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, where the Israeli military has reportedly killed more than 66,000 people and turned most of the enclave into rubble.
A blockade on humanitarian aid in the territory has also sparked deadly hunger, leading to a declaration of famine in August for more than half a million people in Gaza.
Craig Mokhiber, a former director for the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said allowing a country that commits genocide to participate in sports allows for its “normalisation” saying, that, in turn, “is an act of complicity”.
“We remember well the situation in apartheid South Africa, where the world unified to isolate the regime in order to change its behaviour, and that included – very importantly – sports boycotts and cultural boycotts,” Mokhiber said.
The international football governing body FIFA suspended South Africa in 1961 due to the country’s apartheid regime. The move was seen as a historic triumph for the global movement to end the violence and segregation.
More recently, in 2022, both FIFA and UEFA suspended Russia within days of it launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s a stunning level of hypocrisy and double standards that they reacted so quickly and so forcefully with regard to Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine, and yet have been dragging their feet in trying to avoid action when it comes to a full-blown genocide by a regime that has been certified as practising apartheid,” said Mokhiber.
Palestinian rights advocates have been calling to ban Israel from world football competitions for decades, in part because Israel has professional teams based in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
FIFA’s rules unambiguously state that “member associations and their clubs may not play on the territory of another member association without the latter’s approval”.
Yet, Israel’s clubs and national teams continue to participate in international competitions through FIFA and UEFA.
Although based in West Asia, Israel joined UEFA in 1994 amid Arab and Muslim boycotts of its teams.
As the attacks on Gaza continue, Israel’s national team is participating in the European World Cup qualifiers, and its clubs are competing in UEFA’s continental tournaments, with Maccabi Tel Aviv FC featured in this season’s Europa League
But calls for ostracising Israel from world football have been gaining momentum in recent months.