Rima Hassan MEP has seen displacement, an Israeli prison, refugee camps, and since becoming a politician just two years ago, has faced 22 legal proceedings. But the Left Franco-Palestinian MEP will not stop denouncing ‘the genocide that is currently taking place’.
Gaia Neiman 
“I don’t understand how you can be involved in politics if you’re not an activist.”
Born to Palestinian asylum seekers in a refugee camp in northern Syria, French MEP Rima Hassan has been preparing for the political arena her whole life.
“In politics, everything is driven by activism, by convictions. Otherwise it’s just administrative work.”
Even before her term as member of the European Parliament for the Left party started in 2024, she took to the streets among pro-Palestine and pro-democracy rallies.
In 2025, she was captured and arrested by Israeli armed forces for attempting to deliver aid to Gaza on the Global Sumund Flotilla.
Since her election under the French leftwing political group La France Insoumise [France Unbowed], “in just two years, I’ve already faced 22 legal proceedings,” she said, while preparation for her latest court excursion.
On 7 July, the 34-year old MEP was expected to face a charge for “glorifying terrorism”, since she reposted a quote from the author of a mass-shooting in an Israeli airport in 1972, Japanese militant Kōzō Okamoto, in March 2026. The trial has been postponed until October.
The quote she had posted was: “As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”
“The report filed regarding the tweet didn’t come from just anyone; it came from the state,” she said. “So it’s political.”
Although La France Insoumise party and Hassan herself have deemed this an attack on pro-Palestinian voices, this event has encapsulated how much of a target she is in her own workplace.
“That’s what immunity is there for. It’s there to protect MEPs’ freedom of expression,” she said. “This has never happened to any European deputy before – being caught in the act for a tweet.”
Hassan worried this could set a precedent in undermining the immunity of MEPs, or in applying anti-terrorism laws for pro-Palestine and progressive struggles.
“There’s a widespread phenomenon of repression that targets people who denounce the European Union’s complicity, and the complicity of our member states, in the genocide that is currently taking place.”
Because of her allegiances, Hassan has faced harassment in the course of her work, on the internet, on the street, all the way up to the corridors of the parliament in Brussels.
The MEP has been called a spokesperson for Hamas and an anti-semite, with threats frequently materialising in legal accusations, media disinformation campaigns, and heavy surveillance.
That hasn’t stopped Hassan from working on issues dear to her cause, from the committee on foreign affairs, to human rights and relations with Palestine.
Locked in ‘a two-state problem‘
“I’m now coordinating a working group within La France Insoumise that brings together dozens of researchers to move beyond the two-state paradigm.” From September, Hassan and her colleagues will be aiming to produce alternatives to the current Oslo accords.
“In reality, there is only one state,” she said. “This is a status quo, it’s not a two-state solution; it’s a two-state problem.”
“Nobody believes in the two-state solution. That’s the reality,” she said, on the topic of the “political cowardice” she senses in the diplomacy of her peers.
When she’s spoken to off the record by European diplomats advocating the official line of EU foreign policy, she says, their conviction on a two-state solution suddenly falters.
With the death toll in the Palestinian territories mounting above 74,000 since 7 October 2023, demanding nothing more than Brussels’ status quo “is not merely a lack of courage; it is a criminal policy to advocate for a two-state solution today.”
Her work has invited consistent confrontation, with questioning of her allegiances and neutrality because of what her background represents – but the truth is: “I don’t work in the interests of the Palestinian state. I have no connection to it and I often criticise the Palestinian Authority.”
