Defying war, Gaza’s footballers play on
Despite the looming threats of death and destruction, Gaza’s footballers came together for the tournament, determined to reclaim a fleeting sense of normalcy through the game they love.
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Last week, on the ruins of a solitary beach club west of Gaza City, a tournament took place featuring footballers from across the besieged Strip.
Organized by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA), the tournament brought together players aged 19-21 for a two-day event pitting representatives of some of Gaza’s established football clubs.
The tournament took place on the destroyed grounds of the Al Shati Services Club (نادي خدمات الشاطئ), which was established in 1951. The club has a storied football history, having won the Palestinian Premier League in 1983-84, and the Gaza Strip Cup two years later.
The club services the Shati camp, a Palestinian refugee camp located along the Mediterranean Sea coast in the northern Gaza Strip. The camp was founded following the violent expulsion of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land during the establishment of Israel in 1948. The event is referred to as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”).
Since then, many of the refugees who were violently dispossessed, as well as their descendants, have lived in scattered camps across Gaza. Al Shati is home to tens of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes in Jaffa, Lod, and Beersheba. There are now almost 100,000 refugees living in the camp, making it the third largest of its kind in Palestine.
However, the camp has come under constant bombardment by Israeli forces over the past few months. In July 2024, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) conducted shelling operations in the refugee camp that targeted a group of Palestinians praying near the ruins of a mosque in the camp. The strikes killed 22 people.
In October 2024, Israeli strikes killed at least five Palestinian children and wounded 12 others, including women, following an airstrike on the camp. Last week, an Israeli air raid on a school-turned-shelter in the camp killed 10 people and wounding at least 20 others.
Despite the looming threat of further attacks, Gaza’s footballers came together for the tournament, determined to reclaim a fleeting sense of normalcy through the game they love.
“Amid the devastation caused by the ongoing Israeli occupation, the people of Gaza are challenging their harsh reality by organizing activities to revive sports, which had been stopped for over a year,” the PFA statement read.
The tournament comes in the wake of a PFA initiative to organize training camps for displaced youth in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza.
Around 80 displaced boys aged 9 to 13 participated in these football training sessions, which were overseen by Palestinian football coach Muayad Abu Afash. The, aim was to nurture emerging football talents by offering them structured training sessions three times a week. It also provided them with brief periods of psychological relief while developing their football skills.
Many displaced children are no longer attending school, with only a few local initiatives offering makeshift education with limited teaching. NGOs often attempt to organize activities but most young children still spend their days on the streets.
As of November 2024, nearly 44,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the span of 13 months. This includes at least 113 journalists and over 224 humanitarian aid workers. 102, 347 Palestinians have been injured as a result of the extensive bombardment of Gaza, while more than 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza’s population — have been internally displaced since the war broke out on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the PFA, more than 523 athletes have been killed since October 7, including 241 football players (67 children and 174 adults). Among the notable names is Hany Al-Masdar, a former player and manager of the Olympic team, and Mohammed Barakat, Gaza’s first centurion of goals and a former national team player known as the “Legend of Khan Younis.”
Israel has destroyed or partially damaged no less than 28 football facilities in Palestine since the start of the war, 22 in Gaza and six in the West Bank. These include all of Gaza’s professional football stadiums, as well as the PFA headquarters, which was also targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
Al Yarmouk Stadium—one of the oldest sports facilities in Gaza—was transformed into a makeshift internment camp for Palestinian detainees, where dozens of men, women and children were rounded up, stripped down to their underwear, and blindfolded while Israeli soldiers posed for photos.
On Thursday, after 13 months of accumulated war crimes and crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Masri.
The court found it has reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant are criminally responsible in the "war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts," in Israel's destruction of Gaza.
While Netanyahu’s office referred to the ruling as “antisemitic,” the European Union’s highest ranking foreign policy diplomat Josep Borrell said the ICC warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant are not political and the court decision should be respected and implemented. Several other European political leaders have called for the warrants to be respected.
Whether or not Netanyahu faces arrest, the harm inflicted on Palestine and its sporting landscape remains irreversible.
On Nov. 11, the PFA shared a series of photographs depicting an expanse of makeshift tents spread across one of Gaza’s famed football pitches: the Palestine Stadium.
The photographs were accompanied by a somber message announcing that the stadium had been “transformed into a haven for displaced people fleeing the bombing, to witness dreams now extinguished.”
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A great article