Belgian lawmakers said they would quiz the government on how an alleged participant in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel was able to enter Belgium and to take up residence in Brussels.
Mohanad Alkhatib was photographed attending anti-Israel events in the Belgian capital in recent months. On Oct. 7, 2023, he was filmed smiling while touring some sites of Hamas’s deadly invasion, which claimed the lives of some 1,200 people.
On Sunday, the Jewish Information Department (JID), a communal watchdog, shared with the media a 65-page portfolio documenting Alkhatib’s social network and actions on Oct. 7, 2023.
Sam van Rooy of the right-wing Flemish Interest Party, and George Louis Bouchez and Denis Ducarme of the centrist Reformist Movement, said they would grill Immigration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt of the ruling New Flemish Alliance during a Q&A in the Belgian parliament in the coming days.
Neither van Bossuyt’s office nor the Belgian Interior Ministry had replied by time of publication to JNS’s request for comment on the Jewish group’s report.
According to the Federal Migration Center of Belgium, Belgium has taken in at least 700 people from Gaza after Oct. 7, 2023, but is not accepting requests for asylum on a humanitarian basis.
However, that figure does not include people from Gaza who entered Belgium through another E.U. member state, or those who entered Belgium illegally. Van Rooy told JNS the official figures massively underrepresent the actual number of Palestinians and Gazans in Belgium.
The kingdom, van Rooy said, ends up being the place of residence for at least half of all Palestinian asylum seekers coming to Europe. “The screening process is a joke: there are many Hamas sympathizers and even jihadist terrorists among them,” he added.
This is dangerous for Jews in Antwerp and Brussels “but also for non-Jews,” said van Rooy. Belgium must “immediately stop allowing Palestinians to enter, or antisemitism and the jihadist terror threat will only continue to increase,” he said.
From Belgium, Alkhatib is able to travel across Europe and has been spotted at anti-Israel demonstrations in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as well as in Belgium, JID wrote. Alkhatib describes himself as a journalist, and JID has found an image of him posing with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, whom Israel is thought to have killed in Tehran in July.
“It is incomprehensible that volunteers and private citizens were able to identify this man using open sources, while our security services apparently never noticed him,” said Ralph Pais, the vice president of JID. “The Alkhatib material clearly shows that he filmed the violence, celebrated it, and openly supports Hamas, rocket attacks and martyrdom.”
In August, Belgium’s Commission for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRA) revoked the refugee status of another Palestinian man, Mohammed Khatib, who had acted as the coordinator of the Samidoun network for Europe. Samidoun is committed to working toward the liberation and veneration of terrorists in Israeli and other jails. He has not yet left Belgium, according to van Rooy.
In October 2024, the United States and Canada issued joint statements listing Samidoun as a terrorist entity. The United States called Samidoun a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.”
