Activists rally to ‘kick Israel out of FIFA’ despite team’s absence from World Cup

TORONTO, Canada — Protesters unfurled a massive red banner on top of the World Cup logo near a busy highway in Toronto on Friday, denouncing FIFA’s association with Israel, hours before Canada’s first game.

The anti-Israel demonstrators donning shirts that read “Jews for a free Palestine” mounted a nearby embankment and dropped the banner with the message “Kick Israel out of FIFA.”

While Israel is a member of the soccer association, its national team did not qualify for the World Cup.

The banner was visible to commuters on the Gardiner Expressway — one of Canada’s busiest — on their way to the home team’s opener against Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Toronto stadium.

Other actions organized by a group of activists included demands for the release of prominent Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya, an officer in Hamas’s Military Medical Services who is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, and was captured by the Israeli military in Gaza in late 2024.

Following his arrest, a decade-old photo surfaced showing him wearing Hamas uniforms alongside senior members of the terror group. Abu Safiya holds the rank of colonel in the terror group’s Military Medical Services, according to the service and Palestinian media reports.

The Military Medical Services is separate from Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, though some of its members directly participated in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror onslaught in southern Israel, which sparked the Gaza war.

Israel has said Abu Safiya was a high-ranking Hamas operative, but has not accused him of participating in any specific acts of terror. Another director of Kamal Adwan, who was captured by the IDF earlier in the war, revealed in an interrogation that the MMS-affiliated hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point it housed a kidnapped soldier. That director, Ahmed Kahlot, said some 16 members of the hospital’s staff – including doctors, nurses and paramedics – are also Hamas operatives who serve in the al-Qassam Brigades.

Faisal Ibrahim, a spokesperson for the activists, accused FIFA of being complicit with Israel’s actions against Palestinians.

“FIFA not only turns a blind eye to the Israel Football Association’s playing of games on illegally occupied West Bank and Syrian territory, it actually actively broadcasts those games, thereby normalizing occupation and erasure, which makes FIFA an active and complicit participant,” he told Reuters.

In March, global soccer’s ruling body said it would take no action against Israeli clubs accused by the Palestine Football Association of competing while allegedly based in Palestinian territory, citing the unresolved legal status of the West Bank under international law.

UN experts have also appealed to FIFA and the Union of European Football Associations to suspend Israel from international football.