Goals and genocide: Israel's attack on Palestinian football

As the national teams of Asia prepare for the upcoming continental AFC Asian Cup, the Israeli military is transforming a football stadium in Gaza into a mass detention camp.

In the Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City, Palestinian men and children were seen to have been stripped down to their underwear, surrounded by Israeli tanks.

It is currently unfathomable to imagine grasping a football tournament occurring during one of the worst atrocities in contemporary history.

"For the Palestinian team, some of whom are natives of Gaza and will not know the fate of some of their family members, their third Asian Cup in history coincides with Israel’s fifth aggression on Gaza"

More than 23,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed by Israel's brutal and indiscriminate bombing campaign.

The Palestinian team head coach Makram Daboub revealed, "Everyone is glued to the news, before and after training, be it on the bus or at the hotel."

For the Palestinian team, some of whom are natives of Gaza and will not know the fate of some of their family members, their third Asian Cup in history coincides with Israel’s fifth aggression on Gaza.

From the perspective of the children of Gaza, imagine living through more shelling campaigns in your brief 16 years of existence than your national football team's continental football competitions.

Giant-killing

Last Saturday, on January 6, Hani Al-Masdar, a towering figure within Palestinian football, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. The 42-year-old manager of the Olympic football team (U23’s) was struck by shrapnel from a missile close to his home in the Gaza Strip's Central Governorate village of Al-Masdar.

Some members of the current team have risen through the ranks to the full national team after progressing from the U23s, notably 21-year-old striker Zaid Qunbar, who scored in several championships for the U23 presumably under Al-Masdar's guidance. However, for certain other players within the Palestinian team, this aggression strikes closer to home.

Mahmoud Wadi, the most expensive transfer in Palestinian football and a striker currently playing in Egypt, was born and raised in Khan Yunis, Gaza.

Wadi has had only intermittent contact with his family and friends since the beginning of this aggression. At the Asian Cup, he will carry the burden of a nation as the second-most capped forward currently playing for the Palestinian side.

All the while, he grapples with the trauma of knowing of the killings of many players he competed against and alongside throughout his life in Gaza.

"I can’t stop thinking about them. People there are being killed and bombed every moment. After training, meetings, and meals, we retreat to our rooms and tune in to the news channels to stay updated on what’s happening"

In 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, the longest onslaught by Israel on the Gaza Strip before this current aggression, Wadi was given the chance to join the national squad for the first time.

"I had to train. But I didn't care about the war. I could see an Israeli jet shooting and I was training. I was running on the seawall, watching them attack buildings. I was expecting death at any moment,” he said at the time.

Palestine’s first match following the onset of the aggression in October was a 2026 World Cup Qualifier against Lebanon in the UAE on November 16, which ended in a 0-0 draw.

In the days following the match, Wadi hadn’t heard from his family for 48 hours. He later expressed: “I can’t stop thinking about them. People there are being killed and bombed every moment. After training, meetings, and meals, we retreat to our rooms and tune in to the news channels to stay updated on what’s happening.”

How can we expect any player, whose family is directly facing the repercussions of genocide, to maintain any level of sanity and concentration while playing football, especially in a match as significant as a World Cup Qualifier? After finally getting through to his family, Wadi’s mother's message was, “We need you to carry on and to succeed as that makes us feel happy.”

Mohammed Saleh, another crucial member of the squad hailing from Gaza, is also grappling with the uncertainty surrounding the fate of his family members, with his home already having been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. "They are suffering," head coach Daboub disclosed.

Another Palestinian player who has suffered at the hands of the Israeli military's aggression is Hazem Alrekhawi. Hazem was on a bus with his peers when it was the target of an Israeli missile strike during Operation Cast Lead, Israel's aggression on Gaza from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009.

After being initially thought to be dead, he was wrapped and placed in the mortuary. His mother discovered that, astonishingly, he was still alive when she came to identify his body hours later and saw his hand moving.

After defying death and undergoing a miraculous recovery, Hazem pursued a career playing for several clubs within the West Bank. It was only this past summer that he returned to Gaza to join his brother Mohammed at Shabab Rafah.

Now it was Mohammed who would narrowly escape death; photos surfaced of him surviving an Israeli airstrike on October 11, while wearing the football club's shorts.

Sudden death

It is difficult to compress the many and varied accounts of suffering into a single account that includes the martyrs, the wounded, and the devastated infrastructures.

The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) released a statement on December 14, exactly one month before Palestine's first Asian Cup match, noting the extent of damage caused by Israel's shelling campaign in Gaza and the escalating violence in the West Bank to both human life and infrastructure.

In a span of just two months, from October 7 to December 6, 2023, the PFA reported the deaths of 85 athletes and other individuals associated with sports — 55 in football and 30 in other sports. Among the deceased were 18 children who were footballers, with many others unaccounted for and currently missing.

Additionally, four sports facilities in the West Bank and five in Gaza had been destroyed. Just last week, an update revealed that both the headquarters of the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestinian Olympic Committee in Gaza had been destroyed too.

Foul play

Sports, particularly football, offer children in Gaza a pathway to prosperity. Through athletic prowess, they can potentially rise above their circumstances, travel abroad, and earn a decent wage to support their families.

However, a child's exceptional sporting ability should not be a determining factor in achieving these fundamental goals. These are basic human rights that everyone should have access to, yet the siege makes them nearly unattainable for most Palestinians born in Gaza.

One of the biggest obstacles that every native Gazan must overcome, especially those who possess the athletic talent and the capacity to succeed internationally, is the restriction of movement. This was precisely the case for Mahmoud Wadi.

After the Palestinian Football Association recognised his potential, he was offered a contract by Al-Khaleel Hebron in the West Bank. Due to his origins in Gaza, getting around the West Bank cities was an extreme hardship. To get to away games, Wadi had to manoeuvre through checkpoints while coordinating with other vehicles and drivers.

After spending just under a year in the West Bank, his team was scheduled to face the winners of the Gaza Cup in 2016. Wadi was eager to reunite with his parents, hoping to catch up with them about his whirlwind season during which he had scored five goals in six games.

While his team emerged victorious in the match, the conclusion was bittersweet: despite his teammates being permitted to exit Gaza and return to the West Bank, Wadi was sent home and not allowed to leave.

Another player from Gaza who was offered the opportunity to join a team in the West Bank underwent an even more harrowing experience due to his footballing abilities: Mahmoud Sarsak. Despite receiving a permit to leave Gaza, his situation took a catastrophic turn upon reaching the Erez Border crossing into Israel.

Sarsak was swiftly bound in chains, interrogated, beaten, and subsequently transferred to a prison. He was detained for 45 days without charge under administrative detention, enduring physical and psychological torture before being accused under the "unlawful combatant" law.

After enduring three years in jail with no glimpse of a future, he initiated a hunger strike in the hope of altering his situation and securing his release. His tale started to gain notice, and the then FIFA head Sepp Blatter and football legend Eric Cantona both pushed for his release.

Under the scrutiny of the international campaign, Israel eventually released Sarksak. Ninety-seven days after starting his hunger strike, he regained his freedom, albeit having lost half of his natural weight and bearing a starkly different appearance from the man he was when arrested.

In 2007, before a World Cup Qualifying match in Singapore, 18 members of the Palestinian national team were denied exit visas, and thus they had to forfeit the game.

Shots on target

It’s not only professional footballers who have suffered at the hands of Israeli violence. On July 7, 2001, Israeli forces killed an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy named Khalil al-Mughrabi after shooting him in the head, while he was playing a game of football in Rafah, Gaza.

On July 16, 2014, an Israeli airstrike killed four Palestinian boys, Mohammad Ramiz Bakr, 11, Ahed Atef Bakr and Zakariya Ahed Bakr, both 10 and Ismail Mahmoud Bakr, nine, who were playing football on a beach in Gaza. The Israeli military later announced that the “extensive” criminal inquiry into the case had been closed because it was deemed to be a “tragic accident”.

Just envision life as a child in Gaza. Following Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 (its second of the five bombardments on Gaza), UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, discovered that 82% of children were either consistently or frequently in fear of imminent death. Other statistics from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor revealed that 91% of all children in Gaza suffer from PTSD.

What kind of future can you envision when the fear of death is constantly consuming you? How can you possibly glimpse a silver lining when your view is obstructed by smoke from tear gas and white phosphorus shells? They say tomorrow brings new opportunities, but how can you hold onto that hope when the looming threat of an Israeli airstrike hangs over the night?

All of the children who lost their lives playing the sport they loved likely aspired to compete internationally. Imagine, for a moment, that the children in Gaza today do not suffer the same terrible fate as the more than 12,000 Palestinian children who have already been killed by Israeli shelling since October. What other ways could their world come crashing down, their dreams cut off too soon?

According to Save the Children, “more than 10 children per day, on average, have lost one or both of their legs in Gaza since the conflict erupted three months ago.” Additionally, UNICEF reported that “more than 1,000 children have had one or both legs amputated.”

The healthcare system in Gaza, crippled by the blockade, has led to many of these operations on children being performed without anaesthesia. The Gaza Strip faces significant shortages of doctors, nurses, and essential medical supplies such as anaesthesia and antibiotics. These distressing findings were reported by the World Health Organization (WHO).

How many of these children had dreams of being talented athletes when they grew up, representing Palestine on the international scene, shining a powerful spotlight on Gaza, and raising their flag with pride? The Palestinian people continue to exhibit an unparalleled level of tenacity and perseverance despite their suffering.

In honour of the International Day for People with Disabilities, Gaza City hosted the launch of Palestine's first-ever amputee football team in December 2021. A large portion of the team is made up of players who were previously injured and handicapped by Israeli bombardment, and they play football with the assistance of either crutches or prosthetic legs.

“From the moment of injury, my life has not changed. I continued with my ambition and goal in life, and it is to represent Palestine and to make an achievement for myself in the field of sports and for my homeland Palestine, to represent it in international forums,” stated Hassan Abu Kareem, one of the team’s players who had become handicapped as a result of an Israeli attack on the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in 2006, in an interview with Al Jazeera.

Although the focus of this article is the relationship between Palestinian football and the violence exerted upon it by the Israeli state, to assert that Israel has specifically targeted Palestinian sports facilities would fundamentally be inaccurate. Why is this the case? Because Israel has targeted every single aspect of Palestinian life — culture, heritage, education, and all hope for a bright future in Gaza — in its campaign of mass destruction, leaving nothing spared.

"It’s not only professional footballers who have suffered at the hands of Israeli violence. On July 7, 2001, Israeli forces killed an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy named Khalil al-Mughrabi after shooting him in the head, while he was playing a game of football in Rafah, Gaza"

Football has, at times, assisted parties in conflict to find peace and overcome the horrors of war. One memorable instance is when my nation, Iraq, emerged victorious from the Asian Cup in 2007 despite being the underdogs, providing much-needed peace to a nation experiencing the greatest sectarian conflict in modern history.

Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to the current situation. Even if the Palestinian national team were to win the Asian Cup, it would do little for the people of Gaza in terms of easing the violence, as this isn't a war; it's a campaign of genocide by an occupying power.

The only language that Israel speaks is one of power and finance, and the way that the boycott movement supported the ending of the apartheid state in South Africa, will play its part in ending the apartheid system in place in Israel today.

Just last month, the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement announced a significant win in holding international corporations supporting Israeli apartheid to account.

After a relentless BDS campaign starting in 2018, PUMA announced that it wouldn’t be renewing its contract with the Israeli national football team, much to the delight of the campaigners who had been persisting for years to highlight this issue.

“The years of relentless, global BDS pressure on PUMA and the damage to its image should be a lesson to all companies supporting Israeli apartheid, that complicity has consequences. It is also a lesson to the deeply complicit, Western-dominated FIFA, which continues to shield Israel from accountability despite the settlement teams violating its statutes,” part of the statement read.

Amid the ongoing violence, it falls upon every individual possessing the capability to contribute to ending this genocide to step forward and advocate for the freedom, liberation, and basic human rights of the Palestinian people.

Whether through boycotting, protesting, writing to elected officials, or engaging in other forms of civil disobedience, it's crucial, because, without justice, there is no peace.

On January 14, 2024, Palestine's first game at the Asian Cup aligns with the 100th day of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

For Mahmoud Wadi, Mohammed Saleh, and the rest of the squad, this tournament couldn't have arrived at a more difficult time. Regardless of the results, the only victory we seek is a permanent ceasefire, the lifting of the siege, and an end to the occupation — the only hat-trick we truly need.

Saoud Khalaf is a British-born Iraqi filmmaker and writer based in London. His videos, which have garnered millions of views across social media, focus on social justice for marginalised groups with specific attention on the Middle East. His latest documentary premiered at the Southbank Centre for Refugee Week

Follow him on Twitter: @saoudkhalaf_