July 2 – In a submission to FIFA’s independent legal committee, the Palestinian FA has called for a ban of the Israeli Football Association (IFA), stepping up a previous motion brought before the FIFA Congress in May that demanded ‘appropriate sanctions’ against the Israelis.
The PFA said they have now submitted their legal arguments to FIFA’s independent legal committee saying that they have demanded the FIFA Council suspend the IFA with immediate effect, ban IFA from any football-related activity, respect the territorial integrity of the PFA, in particular in the West Bank, and refer the matter to the FIFA Disciplinary Committee for adjudication.
The PFA president Jibril Rajoub (pictured) said: “For 15 years we have consistently raised the same concerns with FIFA, only to see them repeatedly deferred from one Congress to another, from one committee to the next. Now, as our football faces the same existential threat as our Palestinian people, FIFA must make a choice either to passively stand by, or uphold its core values and human rights obligations, and stand firmly on the right side of history.”
At the FIFA Congress in May, the PFA had demanded ‘appropriate sanctions with immediate effect, against Israeli teams’ and the motion reached the floor, but except for the Jordanian FA, no other FIFA member association spoke up, even though the AFC had expressed support for the PFA in the lead-up to the Congress.
The FIFA membership was prevented from taking a vote with FIFA president Gianni Infantino saying the PFA’s motion belonged to the remit of the Council and mandated for legal advice to be sought, stressing that input from both respective federations would be included.
The head of the PFA legal team Katarina Pijetlovic said: “FIFA can choose either to follow its Statutes and Human Rights Policy commitments or sacrifice its statutory provisions and objectives to continue shielding Israel from liability. Referring this process to committees and task forces would be a futile exercise intended to, yet again, delay the solution on the long-standing issue. Any other decision but immediate suspension would set an extremely dangerous precedent.”
Following the terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7 in which about 1.200 Israelis were killed, 37,900 Palestinians have been killed and 87,060 wounded in Gaza, according to Gaza’s health ministry in Israel’s war in Gaza.
In the past decade, the Palestinian cause has repeatedly been the subject of heated debate at FIFA Congresses, but in 2017, FIFA and Infantino shut down the work and report of its own monitoring committee, led by Tokyo Sexwale. The matter was declared ‘closed’.
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