Covering football can lead many journalists to resort to hyperbole. When Middlesbrough overcame a three-goal deficit to beat FC Basel in the 2006 UEFA Cup quarter-finals, the late commentator Alastair Brownlee shouted that it was “the greatest comeback since Lazarus!”
Two years later, 50 miles west of Bethany, where Lazarus rose from the dead, a Palestinian soccer player actually repeated the biblical feat.
In December 2008, amid deadly Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip, Hazem Alrekhawi, then 19 and a promising player for Shabab Rafah, boarded a bus with nine of his classmates from the technical university that he frequented in Gaza City.
A missile fired from an Israeli F-16 fighter jet hit the bus, apparently killing everyone on board. The bodies were taken to al-Shifa hospital. Alrekhawi, whose body was covered in shrapnel, was wrapped and placed in the morgue refrigerator.
Five hours later, his mother arrived at the hospital, trying to identify her son’s body. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a hand moving. Alrekhawi was alive.
Alrekhawi escaped unharmed, but it seemed unlikely that the defender would be able to continue his football career due to the severity of his injuries.
The Rafah native, however, defied all odds and in 2011 moved to the occupied West Bank – where players are better paid – playing for eight different clubs over 10 years.
This summer he decided to return to his hometown club Shabab Rafah, in part to join his brother Mohammed, 38, who was due to retire at the end of the 2023-24 season.
On October 11, amid intense Israeli bombardment of Gaza following Hamas attacks in Israel, Mohammed came close to death. Photographs showed the attacker being pulled from the rubble of his home, emerging bloodied and wearing Shabab Rafah shorts.
Israeli attacks on Gaza have only intensified since then. Although there is no news of the brothers’ safety, they are not included in the death lists published by the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Just like the Alrekhawi brothers, Palestinian football was considered dead and then came back.
The Palestinian Football Federation (PFA) was founded in 1928 and joined FIFA the following year. But over time, it became an exclusively Jewish organization and changed its name to the Israel Football Federation in 1948, after the founding of the State of Israel.
While Palestinian national teams played over the following decades, it was not until 1998 that the PFA was reborn and Palestine became a full member of FIFA – half a decade after the Nakba (“Nakba”). disaster” in Arabic), during which thousands of Palestinians were killed. and more than 750,000 people uprooted to create the State of Israel.
Palestinian football survived the upheaval of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, the worsening occupation and five Israeli wars on Gaza, with the national team successfully qualifying for three consecutive Asian Cup competitions.
But with no end in sight to the latest war in Gaza, preparing for the start of qualifying for the 2026 World Cup in November and the Asian Cup in January 2024 could prove the most challenging difficult to date.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s footballers remain subject to the full wrath of the Israeli war.
“We die in silence”
Mohammed Balah, 30, left Gaza for Jordan six years ago to forge a professional career. His exploits earned him his national team debut soon after and a career with five clubs in the Jordanian, Omani and Egyptian elite.
Like Alrekhawi, Balah decided to return to Gaza this summer in search of consistent playing time following an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury while playing for Al-Masry in the Egyptian Premier League. He had hoped to turn that into a return to the national team. This is unlikely to happen now.
Balah had survived previous attacks on Gaza; in May 2021, his house was demolished by an Israeli air raid. But in one of his last messages on social networks, as of October 10, he was less optimistic about his survival from the latest wave of violence.
“Maybe (in) a few hours we will be cut off from the world, due to a power outage and the batteries will lose their charge. The Israelis bombed the telecommunications and internet company, they bombed the electricity company and the generators in the streets,” he wrote.
“The other generators do not have any diesel stock. We die in silence, far from the eyes of the world and our friends.
When Balah first left Gaza, he did so with his friend and teammate Mahmoud Wadi. Both men signed for Al-Ahli Amman before parting ways.
Wadi, now 28, moved to Egypt and became the most expensive transfer in Palestinian football when he moved to Pyramids FC in 2021 for a fee of 17 million Egyptian pounds (1.1 million dollars at the time).
In a tearful October 22 interview with Cario-based channel OnTime Sports, Wadi recounted the feeling of living through the 2014 war against Gaza.
“I would go to bed at night and stare at the ceiling expecting it to crash on my head at any moment,” he said.
The attacker has only had intermittent contact with family and friends since the start of this even more devastating war and although no current national or Olympic team players have yet died in this series of bombings, he There have been several deaths in the football family in Gaza.
“Many players I played against or was with in Gaza died,” Wadi said.
Khalil Jadallah, a Palestinian football commentator and analyst, put together a starting lineup made up of Palestinian players who died as a result of Israeli violence.
“It is difficult to know exactly how many people died during this war due to the sheer number of deaths,” Jadallah told Al Jazeera.
The confirmed dead include athletes and administrators from a wide range of sports, including Al-Breij basketball player Bassim al-Nabahin, 27; footballer Rashid Dabbour (28), who played for Al-Ahli Beit Hanoon; and Ahmad Awad (21), who represented the Palestinian national football team for dwarfism.
The Palestinian sports community in the occupied West Bank has also been affected by the increased tensions. Markaz Balata midfielder Mohammed Maree Sawafta, 19, was killed by Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces during a protest in his hometown of Tubas, near Nablus, on October 27.
“It is our responsibility to represent Palestine”
All types of sporting events have come to a screeching halt in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Israel. It has been three weeks since any Palestinian footballer kicked a ball in a competitive match.
With football suspended indefinitely, Palestinian national team players attempted to leave for other countries. The deteriorating security situation in the occupied West Bank has prevented many from moving between cities due to violence from Israeli settlers on the roads.
“Our team’s doctor tried to go from his village to Ramallah but had to turn back because settlers attacked his car. They threw a big rock at him, which broke his windshield,” a current national team player, who wished to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera. “He was lucky to make it out alive.”
With the land border with Jordan closed for hours, Palestine was forced to withdraw from a tournament held in Malaysia from October 13-17.
The entire national team was finally able to leave the country on Monday, but was only able to do so after security was provided by the Palestinian Authority. Coordination with Jordanian Prince Ali bin Al Hussein, who is also president of the Jordan Football Federation, was necessary to open the border and ensure the team’s safe passage.
A 20-man squad led by Tunisia coach Makram Daboub will prepare for a crucial 2026 World Cup qualifier series against Lebanon (November 16) and Australia (November 21).
Things were going in the right direction for Palestine, who have a 100 percent record in competitive matches under Daboub.
It was also hoped that an expanded World Cup with eight places reserved for Asian teams in 2026 could lead to Palestine’s first ever appearance at football’s flagship event.
But if Palestine is to chart its path to the next World Cup, it will have to do so without the advantage of playing at home.
Palestine, who have never lost a World Cup qualifier at home, will instead host Australia at neutral Kuwait.
The national team has relied less and less on Gaza-based players in recent years, with the territory’s top talent flocking to the occupied West Bank and Egyptian leagues in search of better salaries and playing conditions. No players The Gaza-based player has not been called up to the national team since goalkeeper Abduallah Shaqfa was called up for the Arab Cup in December 2021.
But the national team and Palestinian football as a whole “will certainly be affected by Israel’s war against Gaza,” Jadallah said.
“Players were killed when they could have played for the national team. The Yarmouk stadium in Gaza was also destroyed,” he said.
“Lack of home field advantage will have a huge effect on the team against a strong team like Australia. (Palestine) will also have to find a way to overcome the mental difficulties it faced during the war.
The Palestinian soccer team has already been kicked out and left for dead, but perhaps this team has more Lazarus comebacks.
For Mahmoud Wadi, football was a lifeline.
“Without football, I might not be in the position I am today,” Wadi said.
“Football helped me leave Gaza and it is our responsibility to try to represent Palestine as best we can.”
