Sports bodies failure to ban Israel over Gaza genocide 'hypocritical': Journalist

A prominent football journalist blasts the "hypocrisy" of the international sports organizations for their failure to ban the Israeli regime from global sporting events over Tel Aviv's ongoing genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.

Nima Tavallaey Roodsari, who has supported a petition aimed at pushing for such a ban, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

"This hypocrisy just cannot continue to stand, and if it does I fear that's the beginning of the end of international sporting organizations as we know it," he said.

Roodsari reminded that within hours of initiation of Russia's special military operation against neighboring Ukraine last February, all of the sporting organizations issued statements of condemnation. Four days later, they suspended all Russian teams from competing in international sporting events, he added.

The same procedure has, however, not been applied in the case of the Israeli regime, which has brought Gaza under an unrelenting war of genocide since October 7.

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At least 23,357 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed, and 59,410 others injured during the war, which the regime launched following an operation staged by the coastal sliver's resistance movements.

The journalist denounced "the madness, the absolute lunacy, that we've seen [being implemented] on all of Palestinian society in Gaza," asserting, "All of the sporting institutions, they are left with no choice, but to suspend Israel, as they did with Russia."

"Because if they don't ban Israel, they're essentially saying that all member countries of the Olympic movement and the sporting family are not equal, and that some can act with complete impunity," he stated.

Roodsari said if the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wanted to remain a "credible" and "impartial" organization, it had to initiate such a ban.

Otherwise, "they're essentially saying that 'alright, all lives don't matter,'" and Israel "can act with impunity, backed up by the United States..."

The United States, Israel's biggest ally, has been providing the regime with unbridled military support since the onset of the war, arming Tel Aviv with more than 10,000 tons of military hardware.

Washington has also torpedoed the prospect of cessation of the Israeli aggression by stonewalling ratification of all United Nations Security Council resolutions that have called for the realization of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

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