Israel’s far-right sports and culture minister has taken credit for forcing the US National Basketball Association to remove the description “occupied” from its depiction of Palestine on its website, despite the fact that the phrase describes the internationally recognised legal status of the Palestinian territories. The NBA’s site originally listed “occupied Palestine territories” and at time of writing had deleted the word “occupied” at the instance of two Israeli ministers, one of whom suggested they were in fact part of Israel.

The row over the inclusion of the words in a pop-up menu provided by a third party in an online poll of favourite players is the latest example of the lengths Israeli ministers will go to challenge the accepted legal definition of Palestine’s status. In a letter to the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, the sports minister, Miri Regev, called the Palestinian territories “an imaginary ‘state’” and said the listing was not in line with Donald Trump’s recent recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

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