️ The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against FIFA's decision not to sanction Israel over clubs based in occupied West Bank settlements, a senior PFA official said.

️ The PFA has long argued that clubs based in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank – which are illegal under international law – should not compete in leagues run by the Israel Football Association (IFA).

️ FIFA said last month it would take no action against the IFA or Israeli clubs, citing the unresolved legal status of the occupied West Bank under public international law.

️ “Since we have exhausted every legal venue possible at FIFA, we’ll still go by the rules, go by the book, and we’ll appeal that decision because we think it’s very unjust,” PFA Vice President Susan Shalabi said after the Asian Football Confederation Congress in Vancouver.

️ “The [FIFA] council decided after 15 years of deliberations on this issue not to decide. So the only course of action that we have is to go to CAS and to appeal that. We will go through the whole process until we are able to achieve justice,” she added.

️ Shalabi also said visa problems prevented several PFA representatives from entering Canada for the FIFA Congress, though visas were issued after political and media pressure. Legal counsel Gonzalo Boye still had not received a visa.

️ She described the dire situation for Palestinian football in Gaza, where every football structure is either unusable or destroyed. “We lost so many hundreds of footballers; we lost most of them children. So football now in Gaza, there is no football at all,” she said.

Source: www.aljazeera.com