The return of Palestinian football: ‘We are a people who must live’

Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – The floodlights came on at al-Khader Stadium, and for a few hours, the scene looked almost ordinary.

Young men sang from the stands as families settled into their seats and children ran along the front row. On the pitch, the Arab Orthodox Beit Jala and Dheisheh Youth football teams warmed up.

Then the whistle blew. The teams traded chances as fans cheered, groaned and shouted at the referee. It was the first organised competition Palestinian clubs had played in nearly three years.

At half-time, a commotion broke out behind the stadium.

People began rising from their seats to see what was happening. From the pitch, Beit Jala’s 20-year-old Cesar Sarras watched the crowd turn towards the noise.

“I was afraid when I saw all the fans getting up,” he told Al Jazeera.  “Sometimes I hear about tear gas being fired at the field. I haven’t witnessed it, but I hear about it a lot… I thought, this must be the [Israeli] army.”

This time, it was not a military raid, but a squabble between supporters. The crowd settled back into their seats, and the match resumed. For the rest of the night, fans’ attention returned to the game.

“It makes us feel that we have something a little bit normal, like people abroad,” said Rimas Sarhan, 15, from Aida refugee camp, who plays for the Aod Sports Academy and the national youth team. A full stadium, she said, is “a very beautiful feeling”.

Playing around the checkpoints

The match was part of the Thousand Martyrs Cup, named after 1,014 athletes killed since October 2023, when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and intensifying attacks on the West Bank brought Palestinian football to a halt. It is seen as part of a staggered reintroduction of competitive football back to Palestine after a long delay.

Firas Abu Hilal, secretary-general of the Palestinian Football Association (PFA), said that Israel’s occupation has “prevented everyone from playing football through checkpoints, movement restrictions, attacks on facilities, and the arrest of players and administrators.” In Gaza, 90 percent of stadiums have been destroyed, with some grounds occupied by tents housing displaced families, he added.

“We grew up all at once, during a period that should have been the peak of our development,” said Sarras. “It passed us by, and there was no league.”

Now, more than 200 clubs are back playing across the West Bank, Gaza and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

The war has seen the deaths of hundreds of athletes. This includes national team forward Suleiman al-Obeid, who was killed while waiting for aid in Gaza in 2025, and Olympic team coach Hani al-Masdar, killed in 2024.

“We came back because we want to prove to the whole world that we are a people who must live,” Abu Hilal told Al Jazeera.

However, returning to the pitch has meant adapting to many of the same Israeli restrictions that brought the game to a halt. In the West Bank, the PFA has grouped teams by proximity to limit long-distance travel. Even then, matches can be disrupted.

“Every village, every city has an iron [military] gate at its entrance,” Abu Hilal said. “So it is normal for the occupation to come and close this gate, and the team cannot reach the match.”

Still, the disruptions will not stop the tournament. Matches may be postponed, Abu Hilal said, but not cancelled: “The matches have to happen, and we have to play.”

The financial strain is also affecting clubs and players. With clubs unable to afford player salaries, many professional footballers have returned to amateur status. And after nearly three years without competition, many athletes have found their careers difficult to recover.

“Some people’s sports careers ended,” said Mohamed El-Zgairy, a Dheisheh player who coaches at a local football academy. “If I hadn’t kept up with myself, through the academy and coaching, I wouldn’t have been able to go back and play.”

His own career was interrupted long before the latest suspension, after he spent eight and a half years in Israeli prisons at multiple detention sites. In 2015, soldiers shot him twice in the leg, shattering a bone, and the injuries kept him off the pitch for two years.

“I had given up,” El-Zgairy said. But he eventually returned to training.

“There is no room for surrender,” he said. “We want to resist, we want to live, and we want to cling to hope.”

Braced for the next interruption

Across Palestine, football is being played at grounds that have come under attack over the past three years. The PFA says Israeli attacks have damaged or destroyed 265 sports facilities in Gaza since October 2023, a pattern it has called a “sports genocide”.

The threats extend to the West Bank. In Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, the AOD Sports Academy trains in the shadow of Israel’s separation wall, lined with watchtowers. Residents say the camp also faces frequent, violent military raids.

“It affects the players’ psyche,” said Karim, a 20-year-old training for the Thousand Martyrs Cup, who asked that his real name not be used to avoid problems at checkpoints.

Even the AOD Sports Academy pitch itself is under threat. It was issued an Israeli demolition order in late 2025. After an international campaign drew in football governing bodies FIFA and UEFA, the demolition order was frozen, though the Aida Youth Centre said it has received no official confirmation that the threat is gone.

“This field is a breathing space for us,” Karim said. When the demolition order came, he said there was shock. “We could not imagine it happening,” he added.

The pitch is one of the few open spaces in the crowded camp where children have room to run and play, and also a place where the camp’s girls have claimed the game.

“I broke the rule that football is not for girls,” said Fatima Lutfi, 15, who plays on the pitch with Aod Sports Academy.

Despite the restrictions and challenges, the PFA says it will keep the tournament going, and the Thousand Martyrs Cup will become an annual fixture, Abu Hilal said.

From al-Khader Stadium, Beit Jala player Sarras said: “There really are people whose lives depend on being able to live their dream, because it gives them hope. And we don’t have that. But we exist. We are not just a number.”