Protests in Belgium against Israel’s participation in cycling race

Belgian and Luxembourgian associations in solidarity with Palestine organised a protest in several Belgian cities against the participation of an Israeli team, Israel Premier Tech, in the Tour de Wallonie cycling race, which is sportswashing apartheid, according to the Palestinian News Agency WAFA.

The participants called for intensifying the boycott against Israel as a means of supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people to establish a free and democratic Palestinian state, in accordance with United Nations resolutions.

They also stressed that the Israeli occupation distracts attention from its racist policies through sports, aiming to normalise its crimes and rhetoric, noting that the occupation and its leaders should be held accountable before the International Criminal Court (ICC), and that the occupation is an apartheid regime.

Participants raised the Palestinian flag and signs in the streets through which the bike race passed, recalling recent reports that documented the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation in Palestine, issued by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and many other international and Israeli human rights organisations.

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