“The beautiful game should bring people together, not rubber-stamp apartheid.”

Brad Reed

Sep 22, 2026

Human rights group Amnesty International on Tuesday slammed the Union of European Football Associations for allowing the Israel men’s team to participate in upcoming Nations League matches despite the Israeli government’s continued systemic human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s regional director for Europe, called Israel’s participation in the UEFA games “unconscionable,” citing “clear evidence that Israel’s football association continues to support illegal settlements.”

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Cockburn said that UEFA should have long ago suspended the Israel Football Association (IFA) over its “refusal to exclude clubs based in illegal settlements” in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“As the money keeps flowing from FIFA and UEFA to the IFA,” Cockburn said, “they risk contributing to the sustainability of illegal settlements and of Israel’s unlawful occupation... and therefore Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ human rights.”

“Sport should never be used as a public relations spectacle for states committing atrocities,” Cockburn added. “As the Israel team travels to Europe, Palestinian families are being displaced and dispossessed, their land stolen, their olive trees uprooted, and their histories erased by settlers with the support of the Israeli military. The beautiful game should bring people together, not rubber-stamp apartheid.”

As explained in a Tuesday report from BBC, Israeli’s inclusion in the Nations League has been a source of controversy for months.

Delegates for the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), which faced signifiant public pressure to boycott matches between Ireland and Israel, recently voted in favor of playing the matches, although roughly 30% of delegates voted in favor of a boycott.

Regardless, more than 160 Irish athletes on Monday signed an open letter organized by Irish Sport for Palestine urging FAI to reconsider its vote in favor of the matches.

Heimer Hallgrimsson, manager of the Irish men’s team, tried to justify the matches by arguing that Ireland was playing against Israel, which meant it was really playing “against genocide.”

The IFA shot back at Hallgrimsson, accusing him of “ignorance, hypocrisy, and stupidity.”

The BBC also noted that the two scheduled matches between Israel and Ireland will be played on neutral cites in Hungary and Serbia “against a backdrop of ongoing and increasingly volatile disagreement between the two countries about Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.”

Cockburn praised efforts by sports fans to keep pressure on the UEFA to “demand accountability, justice and, fair play.”

“When rules are broken, when occupation, apartheid, and genocide are ongoing,” he emphasized, “we cannot look the other way.”

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