Sport

Palestinian women footballers build toward a league restart

Times of PalestineNEW1h ago

Published Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 13:50 Jerusalem time

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By the Times of Palestine Newsdesk · 2 min read

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The Palestinian Football Association restarted men's league play on 4 September with the Thousand Martyrs Cup, named for the 1,014 athletes the federation counts killed since the war began.

The women's Elite League has not published a fixture list, a table or a season since its last detailed announcement in October 2023 — a single group played in three stages, with Sareyyet Ramallah, Diyar, Beit Liqya, Safa, Al-Eizariya and clubs from Beit Sahour and Beit Safafa among the entrants.

What has moved is the institutional work underneath a future season. In June the federation opened a level-C coaching course with Al-Quds University for 26 coaches, women among them, and it has kept entering age-group sides in West Asian competition: the under-17 girls' team was drawn with hosts Jordan and Bahrain for the sixth WAFF girls' championship.

The senior national team, the Fedayat, has posted its best results in the program's history without playing a match on Palestinian soil. The side finished runner-up at the ninth WAFF Women's Championship in Jeddah in November-December 2025, matching its best finish since the federation's 2005 debut.

Coach Ahmed Sharf's squad opened 2026 Asian Cup qualifying in Dushanbe against Malaysia, North Korea and hosts Tajikistan, a group nine of its West Bank-based players reached only after routing checkpoint delays that federation and press accounts have documented for over a decade.

Captain Sireen Ghattas also leads the futsal side, ranked 30th in the world in FIFA's December 2025 list — the highest ranking any Palestinian national team currently holds.

The clubs that would field a restarted league carry the same war losses as the men's game. WAFA's tally of damage to Palestinian sport counts 269 facilities destroyed wholly or partly in Gaza, where six women's clubs played before the war, alongside 20 damaged facilities in the West Bank.

Diyar in Bethlehem and Sareyyet in Ramallah, sitting a few kilometres and a checkpoint apart, remain the two clubs both feeding and drawing from the national side.

The federation has delivered the coaching pipeline and kept the national teams competing; what it has not yet delivered, on its own published record, is a fixture list for the women's domestic game to match the one the men's Cup now has.