Staff at VRT, the main public service broadcaster for Belgium's Flemish community, interrupted footage of the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final on Thursday to display a message protesting Israel's military action in the Gaza strip.
"This is a union action. We condemn human rights violations by the state of Israel," the message at the beginning and end of the broadcast read. "Furthermore, the state of Israel is destroying freedom of the press. That's why we're now briefly interrupting the image."
The message concluded with the social media hashtags "#CeasfireNow" and "#StopGenocide."
Israel launched its military action in Gaza after militants from the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement murdered around 1,200 people in Israel on October 7 and kidnapped 252, including women and children.
A VRT spokeswoman told dpa that "trade unions always have the right to take action" without permission from VRT.
The move was condemned by the Flemish Forum of Jewish Organizations (FJO), which said in a statement: "Not only do they turn an entertainment programme into a platform for indoctrination and political action, in addition the text projected on the screen excels by utter one-sidedness."
"Not a single word condemns or even mentions Hamas' bestial pogrom on innocent Israeli civilians last October 7," the FJO statement added.
The trade union's reference to freedom of the press came after Al Jazeera's offices in East Jerusalem were raided on Sunday, according to Israeli media reports, after Israel decided last week to close the operations of the Qatari-based broadcaster in the country.
Israel accuses the broadcaster of biased reporting on the ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Al Jazeera rejects the accusations.
"Israel has the freest press in the entire Middle East. Israel has a pluralistic media culture," the FJO said on Friday. But "as a country at war, it has a duty to set limits to incitement and the spread of hatred in order to protect its citizens. That is why it recently decided to impose a temporary broadcast ban on the Arabic channel Al Jazeera."
In a post on X, the Israeli ambassador to Belgium, Idit Rosenzweig-Abu, called the union statement on VRT "anti-Israel lies."