The official website of the BDS movement, run by the “BDS National Committee,” has slammed Qatar for allowing an Israeli team to partake at the World Aquatics Championships being in Doha, stating that “the genocide of Palestinians continues in Gaza – and the enemy swims in Doha.”
Curiously, this piece of sharp criticism has been found, so far, on the movement’s Arabic-speaking outlets alone and not in any other language.
The statement claimed that the sports sector in Gaza is also suffering “the ugliest of infringements and massacres,” including “the targeting of Palestinian athletes” and the “turning of soccer stadiums… into camps of arrest, interrogations, and torture.” It also called on “the official Qatari authorities” to respect the decisions made by the Arab and Islamic summit held in November 2023, which called on nations to exert pressure on “the Israeli enemy” to “stop the genocide.”
Finally, the statement warned that “our enemy is still failing to transfer normalization from the official level to the popular level, and here lies the reason for its insistence on participating in these tournaments organized on Arab lands… Allowing Israeli participation in these tournaments, in addition to being a dangerous normalization… will exacerbate the anger of the masses and their rejection of every attempt to push them to normalize the presence of the perpetrators of the crime of genocide against our people on its soil.”
Past BDS movement actions
This is not the first time the BDS movement has chosen to lambast Qatar for what it deems to be infringements of the boycott picket lines.
In May 2023, the movement denounced “the Qatari government and official authorities” not only for allowing Israelis to participate at the World Judo Championships in Doha, but also for allowing the Israeli anthem to be played following Israeli judoka Inbar Lanir’s winning of a gold medal. The BDS movement then released a similar statement reading, “While our blood is shed in Gaza, the killer’s ‘national’ anthem is played in Qatar!”
In another instance, Qatari normalization was slammed even from within Qatar by a group endorsed by the BDS movement named Qatar Youth Against Normalization (QAYON), condemning the February 2022 hosting of Israeli tennis player Jonathan Erlich at the ATP Qatar Open championship hosted in Doha.
The BDS movement is currently attempting to apply much pressure on international sporting organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA in an attempt to bring them to ban Israeli participation similar to the banning of Russia from events following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Similarly, a recent petition by a group called Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 called on global sporting bodies to suspend Israel from sporting events, reaching over 43,000 signatures.
Notedly, Qatar has been hosting the leadership of the terrorist group Hamas for years, including leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh, with many criticizing the luxurious lifestyle which they and their families enjoy while pretending to represent the people of Gaza living under desperate conditions hundreds of miles away.
According to a report from 2019 published by the now defunct Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, the BDS National Committee is comprised of 28 Palestinian groups, with one of the most prominent one being the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine (PNIF), a coalition of Palestinian factions, including, among others, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; all designated as terrorist groups by multiple countries across the globe.