PRO-PALESTINE protesters have unveiled a display demanding that Fifa suspend Israel from competing in football tournaments in Canada on the country’s last day hosting the World Cup.
Just hours before the World Cup's closing match in Toronto between Portugal and Croatia on Thursday night, activists unfurled red and black umbrellas spelling “Red Card Israel” over one of the city’s busiest highways, the Gardiner Expressway.
Activists staged the protest due to Fifa allowing Israel’s national team to compete in international tournaments despite the sporting body's own constitution strictly forbidding any member association from playing matches on another member's territory without permission.
“Israeli league clubs based in illegal West Bank and Syrian settlements have done exactly that for years, with Fifa not merely tolerating the practice but actively facilitating and broadcasting the matches on its official channel,” a spokesperson for Toronto Kicks Israel Out of Fifa said.
“This constitutes de facto recognition of illegal annexation and a collapse of the rulebook Fifa claims to uphold.”
Activists highlighted that Fifa suspended Russia from international competition within days of the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Toronto protest comes after Israeli forces killed Palestinian footballer and soon-to-be father, Saleem Al-Ashqar, in Gaza this week.
The 32-year-old, who played as a goalkeeper for Khan Younis-based club Khadamat Khan, was killed by live fire while stopping at a shop on the way home from work, the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) said.
He had been married for around five months before his death, and his wife is expecting their first-born child.
A spokesperson for Toronto Kicks Israel Out of Fifa added: “The Israel Football Association operates within a state structure that has systematically destroyed Palestinian sports infrastructure, targeted athletes, and killed hundreds of soccer players (half of them children), coaches, and referees over the course of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Palestinian stadiums have been converted into military detention facilities.
“The erasure of Palestinian sport is not a side effect of war but a feature of occupation and an intentional target of genocide; and Fifa's refusal to sanction the IFA normalizes that erasure under the banner of the world's most popular game.”
More than 1000 Palestinian sportspeople have been killed in Israel's genocidal war since October 2023, around half of whom were footballers.
The game's infrastructure has also been decimated in Gaza, with around 290 stadiums and sports complexes having been destroyed or damaged by Israeli strikes.
“The timing is deliberate. Fifa President Gianni Infantino is currently facing referral to the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, specifically for Fifa's role in facilitating illegal IFA activity,” the Toronto Kicks Israel Out of Fifa spokesperson said.
“The activists reject Fifa's recent humanitarian framing: pitch construction in Gaza through diplomatic initiatives—as incredibly cynical. Building football pitches on rubble while shielding the state responsible for that rubble from sporting consequences is Fifa helping to sportswash a genocide.”
