Hadash-Ta’al lawmaker Ofer Cassif suspended from Knesset for two months

By Sam Sokol 9 July 2025, 3:49 pm

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Hadash-Ta'al MK Ofer Cassif attends a Knesset Economic Committee meeting, in Jerusalem, on July 7, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The Knesset Ethics Committee suspends MK Ofer Cassif, the sole Jewish lawmaker in the Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al party, from Knesset committee meetings and plenary sessions for two months starting on October 19.

Cassif will also lose two weeks of his salary.

In its decision, the parliamentary panel cites what it calls a “systematic and consistent pattern of statements that accuse, either explicitly or implicitly, IDF soldiers of committing serious war crimes.”

These include a post on X in which Cassif shared a picture of Jews lined up outside an emigration office in Vienna in 1938, writing that “this month, exactly 86 years ago, the ‘Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration’ was established in Berlin with the aim of encouraging voluntary emigration of German Jews,” which the committee viewed as comparing Israeli military actions in Gaza to the Holocaust. Cassif also said that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

In its decision, the committee states that many of these statements were made while Cassif was already serving a six-month suspension over comments he made regarding the Israel Defense Forces and the war in Gaza.

Cassif’s new suspension will be delayed, both because of the pending Knesset recess and so as not to overlap with the suspension of Hadash-Ta’al chairman Ayman Odeh.

Odeh was recently suspended by the committee for two weeks without pay starting on July 7 over a March 2024 incident in which he was forcibly removed from the Knesset rostrum after accusing Israeli forces in Gaza of engaging in “murder” and carrying out a “massacre.”

The Ethics Committee also reprimands far-right MK Almog Cohen (Otzma Yehudit) over a statement in which he called Cassif a “traitor” who “represents the interests of Hamas and the BDS movement and serves as a fifth column among us.”

Cassif says of his suspension in a post on X: “It’s not a matter of parliamentary ethics, but of political censorship and persecution as well as terrorization (“chilling effect”) of the entire leftist camp, Arabs and Jews alike.”

Noting that his suspension comes only days before a scheduled vote on ousting Odeh, Cassif asserts that the “real” goal of his suspension is to “thwart our faction from any parliamentary activity altogether, and, in the longer run, to eliminate any representation of the Arab and the democratic Jewish citizens.”

Says Cassif: “The basic notion of democracy is the liberty to debate and express opinions freely. Unfortunately, the Knesset Ethics Committee has turned into another tool of persecution against those who stand up against the crimes committed by Israel in Gaza.”