Spain’s youth minister used a Hamas slogan on a diplomatic stage. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez put her there
🔴 What happened
On 24 September 2026, Spain’s Minister of Youth and Children, Sira Rego, introduced Fadi Elhusseini, the ambassador in Madrid of the Palestinian state recognised by the Spanish government, at a New Economy Forum breakfast. From that podium she said the position of Spanish society was “clear”: “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” She called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal,” accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza, and demanded that Spain cut diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel and that the European Union suspend its association agreement with the Jewish state.
To a Spanish reader those names are obvious. To an international reader they need a map of who holds power in Madrid.
🔴 Who these people and parties are
Sira Rego is a cabinet minister in the government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister and leader of the
@PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español — Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), the country’s main centre-left party. Sánchez governs in coalition with
@Sumar, a left-wing alliance. Rego comes from Izquierda Unida (United Left), the communist-rooted party inside Sumar. Before the ministry she sat in the European Parliament for that political family. Her official government biography is published by La Moncloa, the prime minister’s office.
She was born in Valencia. Her father is Palestinian. She has long used that biography as part of her political authority. Spanish profiles describe a childhood partly spent in Palestine after the family moved there, and a later return to Spain with her mother.
🔴 What the slogan means
“From the river to the sea” is not a vague peace formula. The river is the Jordan; the sea is the Mediterranean. Between them sits the State of Israel. Hamas’s 2017 political document calls for the “full liberation” of Palestine in those same terms. On 7 October 2023 Hamas murdered and kidnapped Israeli civilians. That massacre showed, in deeds, what the project implies for Jews living in that territory.
ACOM’s argument is that the slogan does not become innocent because a minister recites it in a Madrid hotel. The map it describes is the map in which the Jewish state disappears.
🔴 This was not a one-off line
Rego has used this language before. On the day of the 7 October massacre she wrote that “Palestine has the right to resist.” As a Member of the European Parliament she was among the small minority who did not vote to condemn the Hamas attacks. In 2024, when Sánchez’s government recognised a Palestinian state, her political camp — Sumar — celebrated with the same “from the river to the sea” line. On 24 September 2026 she said it again, this time as a minister, standing next to the Palestinian ambassador, and claimed to speak for Spain.
For ACOM, repeating the slogan in that setting is explicit political support for the objective the phrase encodes: the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.
🔴 What Sánchez did after 7 October
In May 2024 Sánchez recognised a Palestinian state that has no agreed final borders and no single government. The Palestinian Authority exercises power in the West Bank with an expired presidential mandate and without a functioning parliament. Hamas seized Gaza in 2007 and still controls it. The last Palestinian presidential election was in 2005; the last legislative election was in 2006.
ACOM’s charge is that recognising that “state” without first demanding elections, an authority that actually governs, and the exclusion of Hamas was a political reward to the Palestinian cause after the massacre.
@sanchezcastejon also did not require prior guarantees on freedoms. Freedom House documents repression of critics by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and severe restrictions and discrimination against women and gay people under Hamas in Gaza. The European Parliament continues to demand that antisemitism and incitement to violence be removed from Palestinian educational materials. A 2026 U.S. State Department report found that, despite announced reform, the Authority continued to provide payments and benefits to terrorists and their families — the system known as “pay for slay.”
International recognition was granted before any of those files was closed.
🔴The family story Rego uses — and what she leaves out
Rego has made her childhood in Palestine and her paternal family a standing part of her public authority. [14] ACOM argues that the story is carefully dosed. There is still no clear public account of her father’s identity beyond the fact that he was a Palestinian doctor who studied in Valencia; of why, after the family moved to Palestine, her mother returned to Spain with Sira while the father remained there with Yasid; or of whom she means when she speaks of “brothers” in the plural.
Her brother Yasid El Rifai is vice-president for campus development at Birzeit University in the West Bank — a senior administrative post. [19] Birzeit is well known for Palestinian factional politics. The Islamic Wafaa’ Bloc, identified by the university itself with Hamas, has won student-council elections, including in 2022 and 2023.
ACOM’s point is not a demand for a family tree. It is that Rego asks the public to treat her biography as political capital while leaving the basic facts of that biography unexplained — and that she knows what “from the river to the sea” means when she says it.
🔴 Sánchez cannot stand outside this
Sánchez appointed Rego after her 7 October comments. He recognised the Palestinian state. In September 2025 he used the words “genocide” and “extermination” about Israel’s war in Gaza and announced a package of nine measures against Israel.
ACOM’s conclusion in the original post: this is a chain of decisions, not a slip of the tongue. The massacre was answered with recognition and no prior reforms. The minister who spoke of “resistance” on 7 October now claims a map on which Israel disappears. The prime minister who appointed her and set the policy is not watching the scandal from outside. He is at its origin.
🖱️Web version with an additional list of links:
a-com.es/en/spains-youth-min…