By Anna Epshtein and Noa Aidan
A French NGO has for years used its Jewish members as cover while supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza, a joint investigation by TPS-IL and the French-based Nova Project shows.
Several days after the October 7 attack, members of the French Jewish Union for Peace (UJFP), who call themselves fighters for human rights, were updated on the massacre by their Gazan partner and expressed “shared enthusiasm.”
“The UJFP is an association that uses the Jewishness of some of its members to make people believe that Jews are anti-Zionist,” French politician and member of the Parliament Caroline Yadan told TPS-IL. “It is a screen that comes to give legitimacy to the worst haters of Jews in France.”
The UJFP’s involvement with terror showcases how Islamist, anti-democratic ideology is sold to the European public under the slogans of anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism, and human rights and how Jewish voices are used to cover for this.
Links to Hamas
The French Jewish Union for Peace, established in 1994, is a radical left and anti-Israel French NGO and a member of the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine. It received funding from the French government till 2017, when they were exposed for using state money to produce video clips for schools that accused both Israel and France of racism.
“Its members are mostly not young, inspired by the Marxism of the ’60s,” Vincent Shabat, a researcher at the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, told TPS-IL of the UJFP. NGO-Monitor is a Jerusalem-based organization that monitors the activities of non-governmental organizations.
The UJFP has been lately working in Gaza with its local partner, another French NGO called Humani’Terre. Its website says it specializes in “humanitarian assistance for populations in difficulty,” mainly in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. However, it has direct ties with numerous terrorist organizations, including Hamas, which it does not hide. UJFP office director Nazih Al-Banna, for example, is a Hamas official and was deputy mayor of the central Gaza city of Burejj on the day of the day of the October 7 attack.
Al-Banna previously served as a director of another French NGO called Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians, which was designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel in 2003 and was involved in legal proceedings in many countries for its funding of Hamas.
In 2020, Hamas governor of Khan Yunis, Hamas minister of agriculture, Nazih Al-Banna, and a man called Abu Taima, a representative of a powerful clan in the Khuza’a region, were all present for the inauguration of the UJFP/Humani’Terre agricultural project – several greenhouses in the fields near the village of Khuza’a, southeast of the Gaza Strip.
During the recent war in Gaza, numerous Hamas tunnels were discovered in the fields around the village. Inside one of the tunnels, Israeli military found an electric vehicle with the ‘Humani’Terre logo.
Khuza’a is the village whose residents, both Hamas members and civilians, attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, killing or kidnapping 117 of its 400 residents.
Members of the UJFP were in Cairo on the day of the attack because they intended to get into Gaza by October 5. However, they did not get entry visas and were stuck in Egypt. On October 9, the delegation members met Abu Taima in their hotel in Cairo and got a first-hand report of the events. He informed them, among other things, that one of his sons was killed on October 7.
A UJFP member Brigitte Challande, present in the hotel, mentioned in her online diary “shared enthusiasm” upon hearing from Abu Taima that “Qassam Brigades, supported by all those in Gaza, joined the resistance … hijacking a tank, taking military and civilian prisoners, heading for the Erez border post, bringing the prisoners and the wounded back to Gaza, destroying pieces of fence and separation wall, in other words giving a situation of confinement a completely different face.”
No words of sympathy towards the Israeli victims of the massacre appeared in Challande’s diary.
UJFP did not respond to requests to comment for this article.
Exploiting Jewish Identity
Jewish names are rare among the UJFP members, but one of them is Sarah Katz. A 72-year-old a demographer who lives in Paris, her father was a Moldovan Jew who fought for Resistance in France during World War II. In one example, Katz quoted on the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” website in 2018 comparing Palestinian terrorists to members of the French Resistance, saying “the fighters of the Resistance were also called terrorists, until they won.”
Between 2011 and 2014, Katz spent almost two years in total in Gaza. After returning to France, she gave interviews describing Gazan society as “very tolerant.”
On the Jewish New Year celebrated last September, the UJFP organized an official launch of a network called Global Jews for Palestine in the European Parliament. “We demand decolonial Jewishness in solidarity with Palestine, an immediate ceasefire, and the end of the Israeli apartheid regime that led to this genocide,” the statement said.
The organization often uses Jewish holidays to promote its anti-Israel agenda on social media.
“On the occasion of this Hanukkah, we extend our solidarity to the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli oppression, its apartheid regime, and its occupying army,” the UJFP posted in 2024.
While claiming to represent French Jewry, it is, in fact, a marginal organization, local Jewish leaders say.
Robert Ejnes, the Executive Director of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), told TPS-IL, “UJFP is often heard of because the media gives it a platform, but it is important to emphasize that it is a small organization that does not reflect the opinions of the majority of the Jewish community in France.”
CRIF is the umbrella organization of French Jewish groups.
Numerous anti-Israel, often Muslim-led platforms use marginal Jewish groups “to claim they are not antisemitic, only anti-Israel, for they can claim support by numbers of Jews. The latter affiliate with them and stand for the same thing – to weaken and, ultimately, eradicate Israel,” Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld, Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, told TPS-IL.
“It’s an ugly, ongoing phenomenon and a hugely harmful one,” he insisted.
In November 2023, soon after October 7, France opened an investigation against Humani’Terre on suspicion that it supported terror and froze its bank accounts.
According to French MP Caroline Yadan, however, a real fight against antisemitic and anti-Israeli NGOs in France has not even begun yet.
“There is the classic far-right antisemitism that has not disappeared. But today, it has been overtaken by this antisemitism that is expressed in the name of human rights, in the name of good,” she says. “We are witnessing a distortion of the anti-racist fight, a distortion of the feminist fight, which in fact is a fight out of obsessive hatred towards the State of Israel.”
“This primary anti-Judaism in France and Europe completely overturns what reality is, and to fight it, we need to reestablish the facts, to reestablish the truth, including the meaning of words,” Yadan said.
