In early January 2023, she filed a paternity suit in Belgian court, demanding to be named a princess of the Moroccan royal family. She claims the man who would be king had an affair with her mother, a 17-year-old shop worker in Casablanca. King Hassan II died in 1999.

Benzaquen, who worked as a hotel receptionist until her retirement, told the London Times on Saturday that until the king’s passing, she was not interested in her alleged relation to him. “I was filled with anger,” she recalled. “The past was a Pandora’s box and I didn’t want to open it. Until then I didn’t look like anyone in my family, now I did, and I was happy. It was a revelation for me.”

She wants members of Morocco’s royal family to submit to DNA tests which would then be compared to her own.

Morocco filed a complaint against Benzaquen for fraud and forgery.

Born in Belgium, Benzaquen made Aliyah in 1971, at age 18. She says her grandmother used to tell her stories about Crown Prince Hassan visiting their home in Casablanca in a Royal Mercedes, bearing gifts of food and cash.

Back in 2008, Benzaquen made headlines in Israel when she first presented herself as King Hassan II’s illegitimate daughter but was not able to secure a court order compelling the Moroccan palace to accept her.

In 2018, Benzaquen hired Belgian attorney Marc Uyttendaele, who represented Delphine Boël, King Albert II’s illegitimate daughter. He made a Belgian court order King Albert II to submit to DNA tests that proved that he was Uyttendaele’s client’s father.

Uyttendaele contacted the Moroccan ambassador in Belgium, asking for “a friendly, discreet, fair and equitable solution.”

She did run a DNA test for the man registered on her birth certificate as her father, a Belgian national named Raoul Jossart, and the results were conclusive: he is not her biological father.

It’s a start. But so far, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, allegedly Benzaquen’s half-brother, is refusing to submit to DNA tests.

Back in 2025, Forbes named King Mohammed VI the richest king in Africa. Half of his wealth is probably a pretty dirham (yes, I looked it up, Morocco’s coin is the dirham, and the exchange rate is 10 dirhams to the dollar).

Source - Jewish Press/X - Video source - E.S/Youtube