News - Middle East: Israel is facing the risk of being suspended from all European football competitions following growing pressure on the sporting body due to the Tel Aviv regime’s relentless genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip. 

Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the Union of European Football Associations executive committee was expected to discuss whether to suspend the Israeli team and club sides from all European competitions.

UEFA is set to meet and vote on the matter on Tuesday.

This came amid a campaign to pressure UEFA to hold a vote, reportedly led by Qatar, one of the body’s key financial backers. Reports say the majority of the members of UEFA's board support the removal of Israel.

The sporting body has been receiving multiple calls for Israel to be removed from international football following Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Former football player Eric Cantona has also called for UEFA to ban Israel.

Banners in recent months have appeared in football games denouncing Israel’s brutal aggression across the blockaded Palestinian territory.  

In September, UEFA displayed a banner reading “Stop Killing Children, Stop Killing Civilians” at the Super Cup final match between Paris Saint-Germain and Tottenham as part of its ceremony. 

UEFA was also recently slammed over its “vague” statement on Israel’s killing of a Gazan footballer.

In addition, several European countries and sports federations have expressed anger at the prospect of competing against Israeli teams, including Italy and Spain.

Campaigns such as #GameOverIsrael are actively pressuring their countries’ football federations to boycott Israeli teams and to ban Israeli players from domestic leagues.

Israel has been committing a cultural genocide as well as its war wages on, having killed at least 412 Palestinian football players out of the over 800 athletes killed since October 2023, with nearly half being children, as well as destroying around 90 percent of sports infrastructure in Gaza. 

Calls to exclude Israel from international sports events have indeed increased recently due to its relentless aggression against Gaza.

In May, Spain was reportedly spearheading a coordinated initiative aimed at persuading the European Union to eliminate Israel from all continental sports competitions over its genocidal war on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories recently called on UEFA to expel Israel from competitions over its war crimes and crimes against humanity in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Francesca Albanese's call came following UEFA’s farewell to a former Palestinian player, Suleiman al-Obeid, whom it called the “Palestinian Pelé.”

Al-Obaid, a former Palestine national team player, was killed last month in an Israeli strike targeting civilians waiting for humanitarian aid in southern Gaza.

Since 2014, the Palestinian football federation has raised the matter of suspending Israel at least five times, but calls have grown louder since October 2023, when the Israeli regime launched its fresh genocidal war against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Israel's bloody war on Gaza has so far killed at least 65,280 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injured some 167,000 others.

Thousands of victims are also feared trapped under rubble, inaccessible to emergency and civil defense teams due to relentless Israeli attacks.

Source: Press TV