4/8/2025–|Last update: 23:22 (Mecca time)
Mehrez Abu Odeh, the coach of the Beit Hanoun Sports Union, has never believed in the role that the American aid centers in Gaza claim that they are playing, and whose goal is to provide food aid to the Palestinians, while he saw it as a way to kill them and care for their humiliation. It is a reality that the data on the ground has proven over the past weeks.
Abu Odeh, 31, never thought of going to these centers, but the increasing starvation in Gaza finally forced him to do what was violating his convictions. He went to her for the first and last time.
Mehrez decided to suddenly go to the so -called Zikim Point in the northern Gaza Strip on July 30, 2025, after hunger was hampered by his two girls, Tala and Tolin.
Mehrez went in the hope that he would return to his two girls and their mother with a bag of flour, but he returned inside a white shroud after suffering an Israeli sniper bullet that settled in his heart and immediately killed him.
They knew him from his sports shirt
Shaher Abu Odeh, the brother of Mahrez, said that he was eating the available food with his brother after that day, and he never told him his intention to go to these centers, especially since he was strongly blame to do so.
Shaher received a call from an unknown, who told him: Are you Shaher, the former football player and the brother of Mahrez? He replied: Yes.
Then the caller told him that his brother had a gunshot wound while he was on his way to the Sheikh Radwan clinic north of Gaza. Moments later, he received a second call from someone else confirming the same news.
Shaher rushed to the clinic, to find his brother Mahrez inside a white shroud, and he was shot in a treacherous bullet in his heart.
“My brother was always worried about everyone who goes to these centers, many of whom have returned martyrs, some of whom were pieces or serious and chronic injuries. But in the end, and on the impact of hunger, he had to go to these centers … he went in his sports clothes and the shirt of his club, which I loved throughout his life.”
Displacement and suffering
Mehrez was attached to football from a young age, as he grew up in a sports family, and his house was overlooking the municipal stadium in Beit Hanoun. That 5 -storey building was completely destroyed by the occupation army in the second month of the war.
Mehrez was displaced with his family from Beit Hanoun to Jabalia at first, and then their displacement was repeated inside Gaza City, before moving to the south, specifically Khan Yunis, with his wife and father, who was taking care of him until his death on July 17, 2024.
Mehrez’s discussion before the war on a humble salary from the Beit Hanoun Sports Club, which stopped at the beginning of the aggression, so that the bitterness of hunger and the narrowness of the situation were tied to the point that he was unable to start a small project like other athletes, some of whom turned to sell through the stones of the streets.
From playing to arbitration and then training
During his career as a player, Mehrez Abu Odeh wore the shirt of only two teams: the youth of Beit Hanoun Al -Ahly and the Beit Hanoun Sports Union.
After his retirement, he went to the arbitration, and managed a number of matches of the second and third grades league after receiving an accredited arbitration certificate from the Palestinian Football Association.
Then he moved to the training, so he obtained several courses that granted him a first -level training certificate approved by the Asian Football Confederation, to work as an assistant coach for the Beit Hanoun Sports Federation, before he took the full task as a technical director for the team.
