ZURICH (Dispatches) – A group of legal experts that includes two former UN special rapporteurs has told FIFA that the Zionist regime and its football association is breaking international law by holding professional football matches on occupied Palestinian territory.
The unprecedented letter to international football’s governing body comes as it continues to deliberate over whether it should sanction the Israeli Football Association (IFA), after a proposal submitted by the Palestine Football Association (PFA) in March 2024.
Over a year later, two FIFA committees are still investigating the complaints, one of which relates to discrimination by the IFA, the other to the Zionist regime’s football teams playing in illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.
Since the start of its war on Gaza, the occupying regime has also killed over 350 Palestinian footballers, including Hani al-Masdar, one of Palestine’s greatest players, and has destroyed the blockaded enclave’s pitches and stadiums. 
In December 2023, footage showed Zionist regime troops turning Gaza’s al-Yarmouk, once a 9,000-seat football ground, into a makeshift internment camp for Palestinian detainees.
Beitar Al-Quds, whose Israeli fans call themselves “the most racist team” in the occupied territories, has a de facto policy to exclude Arabs and Palestinians.
The club has received support from senior Zionist regime figures, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 
In the letter to Bruno Chiomento, chairman of FIFA’s governance, audit and compliance committee, which is investigating what it calls “the participation in Israeli competitions of Israeli football teams allegedly based in the territory of Palestine”, the group of judges, lawyers and scholars outlined the “unassailable facts” relating to the illegality of Israeli settlements.
The 30 signatories to the letter include former UN special rapporteurs on human rights in occupied Palestine John Dugard and Michael Lynk, Ardi Imseis, who is representing Palestine at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and William Schabas, a member of the Sierra Leone truth and reconciliation commission. 
The letter cites ICJ’s 2024 pronouncement on Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Al-Quds.
It refers as well to the Fourth Geneva Convention, to UN Security Council Resolutions 446 from 1979, and to 2016’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which describes settlements as “a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of a solution”. 
“In light of the above, the governance, audit and compliance committee need not concern itself with the question of the legality of Israeli settlements, but simply the issue of whether Israeli teams continue to play football matches in settlements in the West Bank,” the letter reads.
“If that is the case, as the PFA alleges and the IFA has never denied, then the IFA is ipso facto in violation of article 64 (2) of the FIFA Statutes, which states that ‘Member associations and their clubs may not play on the territory of another member association without the latter’s approval’.”