Sport
Palestinian football association restarts Gaza's league on September 4
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Gaza's clubs will play competitive football again on 4 September, when the Palestinian Football Association restarts a league suspended for almost three years. The association's president, Jibril Rajoub, announced the date at a Ramallah press conference on 10 August, saying activities and the league would resume from 4 September.
More than 200 clubs will take part in the opening tournament — 146 from the West Bank, 44 from Gaza and 36 from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon — with play beginning simultaneously in all three places.
The association has called the tournament the Thousand Martyrs' Cup, for the 1,014 Palestinian athletes it says Israel killed during the war. Al-Quds al-Arabi reported that the first round kicks off at six in the evening on 4 September as a warm-up competition, with the following season to count for classification.
The pitches to hold it are few.
Al Jazeera reported in March that a revival five-a-side tournament involving 24 premier and first-division clubs from across the Strip was being played on only three small grounds that escaped destruction, with the second week hosted at the Palestine Sports Club ground in Gaza City, among collapsed buildings and streets still carrying the marks of the war.
The same report noted that some pitches had been turned into shelters for displaced families.
The toll on people and buildings is counted differently by different bodies.
The Palestine Olympic Committee said on 16 February that at least 1,007 Palestinians from the sports, youth and scouting movements had been killed since October 2023 and 265 sports facilities damaged; its vice-president, Asaad al-Majdalawi, told the press conference that 45 women were among the dead, and that 184 facilities were completely destroyed and 81 partially damaged.
Al-Nahar, citing Majdalawi, reported that five others are missing and that the dead belong to 34 federations and sports institutions, including players, coaches, referees and administrators.
The OIC's media observatory reported on 7 July that the Palestinian Sports Media Union counts 1,012 killed and 285 facilities destroyed between the start of the war and 3 July 2026. The association's figure of 1,014, published in August, is higher again. No independent verification of any of the three counts has been published.
Beyond football grounds, Al-Quds reported in June that nine equestrian facilities were completely destroyed along with 15 basketball, volleyball and tennis courts, that dozens of bodybuilding gyms and artificial five-a-side pitches were damaged, and that 19 specialised sports education facilities were destroyed.
What has come back has come back piece by piece, in the ten months since the October ceasefire.
Basketball returned in late February at Maghazi camp in central Gaza after a three-year stoppage, where the player Ismail Hamad called the resumption a message to all Palestinians that life had returned to the courts, and singled out the Khadamat al-Maghazi club; the player Osama al-Sabbah said returning to play in such conditions answered the neglect athletes had endured.
On 18 July the association opened the seventh edition of the Gaza Strip clubs' beach football tournament on the Bahri Club pitch on the Gaza City seafront, with 13 premier and first-division clubs drawn into four groups.
Prize money was posted — $2,000 for the winner, $1,000 for the runner-up and $100 each for the top scorer, best player and best goalkeeper — and organisers said the pitch had been prepared with the means available; a referees' workshop was held at the Ittihad Deir al-Balah club hall, run by the Asian instructor Ibrahim al-Mansouri, on the 2025-26 amendments to the beach football laws.
Wheelchair basketball returned on 31 July, after more than three years, with a tournament at the Khadamat al-Maghazi club ground organised by the Palestinian Paralympic Committee with the Majd Foundation for the rehabilitation of people with disabilities and sponsored by the Jozour foundation, with men's and women's players and a public crowd.
Among those who kept playing through all of it is Mohammed Abu Jofeel. UN News reported in November that he had been a footballer before he was wounded in the 2014 war in Gaza, and that after his leg was amputated he stopped playing for around five months before deciding not to give up.
He was at the Hope Cup for amputee football, held at the Ittihad Shabab Deir al-Balah club ground, where organisers said the tournament was meant to bring hope back after two years of war, and that the closure of the crossing had stopped the team travelling to West Asian qualifiers in Jakarta for the 2026 amputee World Cup.
The federation's aim, UN News reported, is to bring in thousands more people wounded in the latest war.
The national programme is moving too. Rajoub announced a 108-strong Palestinian delegation to the coming Asian Games in Japan, with 67 athletes competing across 19 sports, a friendly tournament for the national football team in China in September, and preparation for the Asian Cup that Saudi Arabia hosts in January. The association has separately asked FIFA to sanction Israeli clubs operating in West Bank settlements and to suspend Israel's membership.
Which Gaza grounds will stage the September fixtures has not been published. Al Jazeera reported in July that clubs in both Gaza and the West Bank are trying to restart under severe financial pressure and logistical restrictions, and no reconstruction plan for the 184 facilities the Olympic Committee lists as destroyed has been set out.
