Sport
Oday Dabbagh scored Zamalek's title winner and leads Palestine's attack
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The boy who learned to finish on the stone streets of Jerusalem's Old City is now the leading goalscorer in the history of the Palestinian national team, and last May he settled an Egyptian championship with one swing of his right foot.
Oday Dabbagh was born in the Old City on 3 December 1998 and came up through Shabab Al-Ram before Hilal Al-Quds took him at sixteen. He scored his first professional goal that first season, four days after Christmas 2015, against Shabab Al-Khader.
What followed at Hilal was the best run any young Palestinian forward has had at home: three West Bank Premier League titles in a row, the golden boot in 2018-19 with sixteen goals, and forty goals across seventy-seven appearances before he was twenty-one.
Portugal, Belgium, a Scottish Cup#
Then he did the thing Palestinian footballers are told is not available to them. He went to Europe and stayed.
Two seasons at Arouca in Portugal's Primeira Liga brought eleven goals in thirty-seven games. Two more at Charleroi in the Belgian top flight followed, and then a loan to Aberdeen, where he came on in a cup final and struck his penalty in the shootout that won the club the Scottish Cup.
A Palestinian from the Old City has a winner's medal from Scotland's oldest competition. That sentence would have read as fiction to the ten-year-old kicking a ball against the walls near Bab al-Amoud.
The winner at Cairo#
Zamalek signed him in August 2025 on a four-year deal running to 2029, and Cairo turned out to suit him.
On 20 May 2026 he scored the goal that won the match that won Zamalek its fifteenth Egyptian Premier League title. He finished that league season with six goals, and a stadium of eighty thousand people learned to chant a name from Jerusalem.
Seventeen for Palestine#
For the national team the record is his outright. By the end of last year he had 51 caps and 17 goals, more than any Palestinian who has worn the shirt, including a hat-trick against Bangladesh in March 2024 in World Cup qualifying and three at the Asian Cup.
He was on the field for the goalless draw with South Korea, one of the results that carried Palestine into the third round of World Cup qualifying for the first time in the team's history — eighteen Asian sides now playing for eight places.
Palestine reaches those matches the hard way. Its home games are played abroad, with Algeria offering to host the fixtures and cover the travel and accommodation that the federation could not. Several players called up for camps have been unable to reach them at all.
Dabbagh has said that representing the country is among the greatest honours available to him, and he says it in the register of a man stating a fact rather than accepting a compliment.
There is a version of this career that never leaves the Old City, blocked at a checkpoint on the way to a trial. There is the version that happened. Palestine's new season opens with its record scorer in his prime, twenty-seven years old, playing every week in Cairo.
