Sport
Palestinian federation restarts domestic football after three-year war stoppage
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Palestinian Football Association will restart organised competition in September after nearly three years without a domestic season, its spokeswoman, Dima Yousef, told Al Jazeera in late July. She said the first phase would be "activational only", with no promotion or relegation, while the sports landscape is reordered and facilities repaired, ahead of launching the eighth season of the professional league next year.
The federation set out the first step on 1 August. In a statement reported by the Cairo daily Al-Shorouk, it announced a competition named the Cup of the Thousand Martyrs for clubs in its accredited divisions, following a consultative meeting held by association president Jibril Rajoub with clubs on 4 July and workshops at branch level. Football in the Gaza Strip has been suspended since October 2023.
The restart comes after the closest Palestine has come to a World Cup.
The team was eliminated in the third round of Asian qualifying, finishing fifth in Group B and missing fourth place — and the fourth round — by a single point, Yahoo Sports reported.The Asian Football Confederation's own account of the decisive match records that Oman's Issam Al Sabhi converted a penalty seven minutes into stoppage time at Jordan's King Abdullah II Stadium in Amman to cancel out Oday Kharoub's first international goal, giving Oman 11 points and the last playoff place.
Yahoo Sports reported that the Iranian referee Mooud Bonyadifard awarded the penalty after Ahmed Taha was judged to have tripped Muhsen Al-Ghassani, and that VAR did not recommend a change to the on-field decision.
The Indian outlet Onmanorama reported that the federation said it had monitored the match closely, with particular concern over the referee's decision.The Associated Press reported that the side, then ranked 101st in the world, had beaten Iraq in Basra in March 2025 and Kuwait in Kuwait City on 5 June, needing to win its last three group games.
Reaching that stage was itself a first: Middle East Eye reported that Palestine had also progressed past the group stage at the Asian Cup for the first time in 2023, beating Hong Kong 3-0 before losing to eventual champions Qatar in the round of 16.The next assignment is the 2027 Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia, where the draw in May placed Palestine in Group A with the hosts, Kuwait and Oman, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
The National reported that Saudi Arabia host the tournament from 7 January to 5 February, opening against Palestine at King Fahd Sports City Stadium in Riyadh on 7 January.
The federation's count of what the war cost Palestinian sport has risen through the year and is its own figure.
A PFA report published on 2 March 2026, carried by WAFA, said Israeli forces had killed 1,007 members of Gaza's sports community between 7 October 2023 and 12 February 2026 — 962 men and 45 women — with the football association recording 565 of those deaths, Olympic federations 317 and the scouts association 125.
The same report put damage to stadiums, halls and administrative buildings at 265 facilities, of which 184 were destroyed and 81 partially destroyed.
Al Jazeera reported in July that about 1,009 members of the sporting community had been killed, among them the Khadamat Khan Younis goalkeeper Saleem al-Ashqar, 32, shot dead by Israeli forces in al-Qarara, near Khan Younis.
A federation statement reported by Goal this month put the toll above 1,013 and said domestic competitions had halted and the national teams could not play at home, unlike other FIFA members. No independent audit of these counts has been published.
Football returned to Gaza in February, on a fraction of a pitch. Reuters reported that Jabalia Youth met Al-Sadaqa and Beit Hanoun played Al-Shujaiya in the Strip's first organised tournament in more than two years, both games drawn, at the Palestine Pitch in the ruined Tal al-Hawa district of Gaza City.
For that tournament, Reuters reported, the federation cleared rubble from a collapsed wall along a half-sized field, put up a fence and swept debris from the old artificial turf.
Reuters also reported that four months after the ceasefire took hold there had been almost no reconstruction, that Israeli forces had ordered residents out of roughly two-thirds of the Strip, and that Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City, which held 9,000, had been destroyed during the war.
FIFA has promised money and withheld sanction.
Its president, Gianni Infantino, pledged $50 million for a new national stadium in Gaza holding 20,000 to 25,000 spectators, $15 million for an academy, $2.5 million for 50 mini-pitches and five full-sized fields at $1 million each, announced in February at the first meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington as part of a $7 billion relief package.
No date or site for the stadium has been made public.
On 19 March 2026, Amnesty International reported, FIFA declined to act on the Palestinian federation's 2024 complaint seeking the exclusion of clubs based in Israeli settlements, saying the "legal status of the West Bank remains an unresolved and highly complex matter under public international law".
Reuters, carried by the Irish Times, reported that FIFA separately sanctioned the Israel Football Association for systemic breaches of its anti-discrimination and fair-play statutes, fining it 150,000 Swiss francs, ordering a prevention plan and requiring anti-discrimination banners at its next three home matches, citing failures over persistent racist behaviour by supporters of certain clubs, notably Beitar Jerusalem.
No response from the Israel Football Association to the fine appeared in that account. Al Jazeera reported the Palestinian federation's reply: the disciplinary findings were a step in the right direction but did not address the scope of the violations raised, including discrimination under Article 4 of FIFA's statutes.
The Egyptian site Al-Qahera News reported in April that the federation had taken the settlement-clubs decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport; no ruling has been reported.
In the West Bank, the game persists without a league. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, summarising a Le Monde report in June, said amateur players continue to train at Faisal Al-Husseini Stadium in al-Ram and in Tulkarem, and that with no regular competition those sessions have become one of the few remaining spaces for social contact and something like normal life under closure and daily restrictions.
Abroad, the team draws crowds it cannot draw at home.
AFP reported that Palestine, then 98th in the FIFA rankings, trained at Athletic Bilbao's Lezama ground before playing at San Mamés in November 2025 in front of 50,000 spectators, their first match in Europe, and that coach Ihab Abu Jazar has lost many family members in the war.
Forward Oday Dabbagh told the Associated Press after the Oman match: "We will keep using football as a message to show the world that there are other things in Palestine."
Whether Gaza's displaced clubs can field sides in September has not been set out, and neither the federation's timetable for the professional league's return nor FIFA's construction schedule has been published.
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