STRASBOURG, FRANCE (VINnews) — A French member of the European Parliament was accused Monday of knocking down the Israeli and European Union flags at an exhibition commemorating the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, drawing calls for sanctions from fellow lawmakers.

Join our WhatsApp group

Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email

François-Xavier Bellamy, a member of France’s conservative Les Républicains and a vice president of the center-right European People’s Party group, said Rima Hassan threw the Israeli flag and the EU flag to the floor in front of photographs of the victims. He called the act an “indignity” and “a form of complicity with those who seek to import once again the antisemitic hatred that marked the worst hours in the history of our continent.”

Bellamy, speaking in the Parliament, urged the presidency to sanction Hassan without delay. His office said eyewitness accounts and the building’s surveillance cameras would support the account, the French daily Le Figaro reported.

Céline Imart, also a Les Républicains member of the Parliament, said several people saw Hassan trampling and vandalizing the flags during the exhibition. “The mourning of the innocent serves as a backdrop for her happening,” Imart wrote. “They are bringing down our values and our identity.”

German lawmaker Hildegard Bentele, whose post about the display was widely shared, said knocking down the flags did nothing to ease the suffering of Oct. 7. “Remembrance deserves respect,” she wrote.

Photographs circulated on social media showed the Israeli flag and the EU flag lying on the floor of a Parliament corridor, still attached to their stands. Hassan, a member of the left-wing France Unbowed party, had not publicly responded as of late Monday, Le Figaro reported.

About 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and about 250 were taken hostage.

Hassan, a French-Palestinian activist elected to the Parliament in 2024, has long been a sharp critic of Israel. French authorities previously questioned her after she described the Oct. 7 attack as “legitimate,” and dozens of French lawmakers have asked that her parliamentary immunity be lifted. The European Union designates Hamas a terrorist organization.

Bellamy said that whatever view a lawmaker holds of the Middle East, toppling the EU flag inside the Parliament is unacceptable, and that targeting the Israeli flag at a memorial days before the third anniversary of the attack is worse.