Regavim, Kohelet, and four other national-camp organizations say France’s Jerusalem consulate, which has hosted a book launch honoring a plane hijacker and helped the family of a senior Hamas leader, has become an embassy to “Palestine” inside Israel’s capital.

The 20 British diplomats who had to leave Israel last week have barely left, and a coalition of Israeli organizations is already pushing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to target the next consulate: France’s.

In a letter sent after Israel stripped the British Consulate General in Jerusalem of its consular role on Thursday, October 8, the Regavim Movement, the Sovereignty Movement, My Israel, Ad Kan, Artzenu and the Kohelet Policy Forum asked Netanyahu to carry out a recommendation that Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar first gave him in August 2025: close the French Consulate General in Jerusalem.

“We, the organizations of Israel’s national camp, some of whom have been directly targeted by sanctions imposed by foreign governments, particularly France, call on you to adopt the Foreign Ministry’s recommendation and order the closure of the French Consulate General in Jerusalem,” the organizations wrote.

“There is no justification for granting France preferential treatment after its efforts to advance sanctions against Israelis, launch investigations against French citizens living in Israel, and promote measures against the State of Israel at the United Nations.”

The British Precedent

Sa’ar announced on October 8 that the British consulate in Jerusalem, which had operated for nearly 200 years, had “ended its role today.” The Consul General and 19 other diplomats were told to leave the country. Israel allowed a team of seven British diplomats to stay in the building, and Sa’ar said their “scope of activity will be very limited.”

“It is not possible to act against Israel without Israel taking appropriate measures in response,” Sa’ar said. “We did not want to reach this point, but the actions of the U.K. Labour Government brought us here.”

Sa’ar listed the British measures that led to the decision. They included London’s recognition of a Palestinian state in September 2025, sanctions on Israeli ministers and organizations, a suspension of defense export licenses, a freeze on free trade talks, and a ban on IDF officers training at the Royal College of Defence Studies. The final trigger was Britain’s decision last month to ban imports from Jewish-owned companies in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said London does “not accept that the Government of Israel has the legal right to close the British Consulate General in Jerusalem.” The building now carries the sign “U.K. Mission, Jerusalem.” The British Embassy in Tel Aviv was not affected.

The British closure followed the American one. President Trump folded the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem into the new U.S. Embassy in 2019. The Biden administration never reopened it and set up an Office of Palestinian Affairs in its place, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio merged that office back into the embassy in May 2026.

A Consulate That Answers Only to Paris

The French consulate has a status unlike any other diplomatic mission in Israel. Its roots go back to 1623, when King Louis XIII named a consul to Ottoman Jerusalem. Since 1948, it has operated independently of the French Embassy in Tel Aviv and reports directly to the Foreign Ministry in Paris. It has no official relationship with the State of Israel. Since 1994, it has been France’s diplomatic channel to the Palestinian Authority.

That status reflects France’s official position on Jerusalem. France has never recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, in any part of the city, and its embassy sits in Tel Aviv. Paris still formally holds to the corpus separatum model of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have put Jerusalem under international rule, and it describes the city as the future capital of two states. President Emmanuel Macron called Trump’s 2017 recognition of Jerusalem “regrettable.”

France also controls four sites in Jerusalem that it calls “national domains”: the Church of Saint Anne in the Old City, the Church of the Eleona on the Mount of Olives, the Tomb of the Kings, and the Benedictine abbey at Abu Ghosh. These sites have been the scene of repeated confrontations. In 1996, President Jacques Chirac shouted at Israeli security officers in the Old City. In 2020, Macron did the same at Saint Anne. In November 2024, Israeli police briefly detained two armed French consulate gendarmes at the Eleona after they refused to identify themselves. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot then canceled his visit, called the incident “unacceptable” and summoned Israel’s ambassador.

The consulate’s record also includes a criminal case. In 2018, Romain Franck, a French national who worked as a driver for the consulate, was arrested for using a diplomatic vehicle to smuggle 70 pistols and two automatic rifles from Gaza into Judea and Samaria. He was sentenced to seven years in prison under a plea deal.

Leila Khaled and the Hamas Connection

The letter cites research by the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP) showing that the French consulate hosted the launch of Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation, a biography of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist. Khaled hijacked TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and tried to hijack El Al Flight 219 in 1970. The consulate’s announcement of the event promised to “draw a portrait of this extraordinary woman.”

The organizations tied the event to the recent Flydubai flight incident.

“Aircraft hijacking is neither a romantic symbol nor a theoretical chapter in history. It is a very real threat to the lives of hundreds of civilians,” the letter stated. “Those who provide a platform for glorifying a figure famous for hijacking aircraft cannot expect Israel to ignore such conduct when examining the status of their diplomatic mission.”

Regavim’s other allegations come largely from an investigation by the French outlet Atlantico, which Israel Hayom reported in September 2025. The investigation found that the consulate supports the Al-Bustan center in Silwan. A former director of the center, Daoud Ghoul, was convicted of membership in the PFLP. The current director is reported to be a relative of a Hamas operative behind multiple attacks, and a board member posted praise for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The investigation also found that the consulate gave a scholarship to a Gaza student who had posted praise for Hitler and calls to murder Jews. She is the niece of a bodyguard of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The consulate also reportedly helped the family of senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk get onto France’s list of Palestinian refugees for evacuation.

Regavim also pointed out that Consul General Nicolas Kassianides personally delivered Macron’s letter to Mahmoud Abbas announcing France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.

France’s Campaign Against Israel

Macron announced on July 25, 2025, that “France will recognize the State of Palestine.” He made the recognition formal at the United Nations in September 2025, leading a group of Western countries in a campaign for the creation of an unprecedented Palestinian state inside Israel’s borders, militarized and ethnically cleansed of Jews, with its exclusively Muslim capital in Jerusalem, centered on Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount.

When Sa’ar’s recommendation to close the consulate became public in August 2025, the French Foreign Ministry warned that the move “would be particularly damaging to our bilateral relationship and would provoke a strong reaction.” Netanyahu took no action at the time.

France’s steps have escalated since then. In July 2025, French judges issued warrants against two French-Israeli women, Nili Kupfer-Naouri of Israel Is Forever and Rachel Touitou of Tsav 9, on charges of “complicity in genocide” for protests that blocked aid trucks from entering Gaza. Kupfer-Naouri called the case an “antisemitic delusion.”

“I blocked trucks that were supplying Hamas,” she said. “If I had to do it again, I would do it again.”

On May 28, 2026, the European Union sanctioned Regavim and its CEO, Meir Deutsch, along with Nachala, Amana, Hashomer Yosh, Daniella Weiss and Avichai Suissa. On June 9, Barrot barred Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering France, along with four settlement leaders and 21 residents of Judea and Samaria. He accused Smotrich of promoting “annexation.” Several weeks earlier, France had banned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein called the measures “disgraceful.”

Regavim says that for years France has funded unauthorized Palestinian construction and infrastructure in Area C, the part of Judea and Samaria that the Oslo Accords placed under full Israeli control.

“For years, we have monitored France’s hostile activities, its funding of illegal construction throughout Judea and Samaria, and its efforts to establish a Palestinian terror state in the heart of Israel,” Deutsch said.

“Now, after being personally targeted by economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, with France playing a leading role, we are calling on the prime minister: Shut down France’s embassy to ‘Palestine’ operating from Jerusalem!

“There is no place in the State of Israel, and certainly not in its capital, for foreign governments actively working to undermine it.”