Algerian right-back Youcef Atal joins Türkiye's Adana Demirspor

By Can Erozden

Turkish football club Adana Demirspor signed Algerian right-back Youcef Atal on Friday.

Adana Demirspor, a Trendyol Super Lig club from southern Türkiye, wrote on X that it agreed with Atal and welcomed the 27-year-old who arrived from Nice in France.

The former Nice defender was convicted in France for a social media post on the Gaza conflict.

In January, Atal was handed a suspended jail sentence.

The Nice-Matin newspaper previously reported that Atal, who was a right-back for Nice at that time, was handed an eight-month suspended prison sentence and fined €45,000 ($49,000) by a French court for "provoking hatred on grounds of religion."

Atal, who won the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations with Algeria, shared an Instagram video in October in which a Palestinian preacher prayed to God to send "a black day for the Jews" amid Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Nice prosecutor opened an investigation Oct. 16.

Atal later apologized but his French Ligue 1 club suspended him for the post and the French league also banned him for seven matches.

Having 29 caps for Algeria, Atal joined Nice from Belgium's Kortrijk in 2018 and scored 12 goals in 115 appearances for the French team.

Despite the International Court of Justice’s provisional ruling, Israel continues its onslaught on the Gaza Strip, where at least 27,947 Palestinians have been killed, including 12,000 children and 8,190 women, and 67,459 injured since Oct. 7, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Hamas, which Tel Aviv said killed nearly 1,200 people.

The Israeli offensive has left 85% of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.