Sport

Palestinian women footballers win West Asian honours far from home

Times of PalestineNEW1h ago

Published Tuesday, August 25, 2026 · 08:02 Jerusalem time

Graphic: Times of Palestine

Original Reporting

By the Times of Palestine Newsdesk · 5 min read

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Palestine's women's national teams have recorded the best results in their history over the past 18 months, and not one of those matches was played on Palestinian ground.

The West Asian Football Federation, on its own website, reported that Palestine's under-20 side entered the winners' register for the first time on 12 April 2025, beating Jordan 4–2 on penalties in Aqaba after a 1–1 draw in the final of the federation's fifth youth championship. Kooora carried the same result the same day.

Four days earlier, the Jordanian state news agency Petra had reported that Jordan beat Palestine 3–0 in the group stage, leaving the Palestinians second on three points. They met again in the final, and the trophy went to Palestine.

The senior side went further than it ever had in November and December. Tournament records for the ninth WAFF Women's Championship, held in Jeddah from 24 November to 2 December 2025 with six teams, list Jordan as champions for a seventh time and Palestine as runners-up — matching the team's 2014 result and equalling its best in seven appearances since 2005.

That first appearance is worth measuring against. The team's compiled match record shows Palestine's first international, in Amman in September 2005, ended 9–0 to Jordan.

The national team was established in 2003 by Samar Araj and is run by the Palestinian Football Association. Vashti Media, reporting in October 2025, described Araj — Samar Araj Mousa — as an athletics director in Bethlehem, and dated the founding of the country's first women's team to the same year.

In June 2025 the federation announced that the senior team, the Fedayat, would open its 2026 Asian Cup qualifying campaign against Malaysia in Dushanbe, at Tajikistan's Republican Central Stadium, where the whole group was staged. The federation said the squad had prepared through a camp in Jordan followed by a gathering in Tashkent and a friendly against Uzbekistan.

Coach Ahmed Sharf said in that federation statement that the team would give everything it had to compete for the group's qualifying place. Only the group winner went through to the finals. Al-Bawabh News reported that the group also contained North Korea and hosts Tajikistan; the match record shows Palestine lost 10–0 to North Korea on 2 July 2025.

Getting to Dushanbe was its own campaign. ABC News reported in August 2025 that nine of the players on the Asian Cup roster were based in the West Bank and travelled on Palestinian Authority passports through Israeli military checkpoints, and that West Bank-based players routinely leave up to eight hours ahead of schedule for international tournaments to absorb delays.

Mira Natour, a former defender who is now the national team's doctor, told ABC Sport by text during transit in early July that players had to gather in one area before heading to checkpoints because closures between cities, or between Jordan and Palestine, come without warning.

Palestine's football federation has logged this for years. The official WAFA agency's record of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian sport lists a women's friendly cancelled and a training camp postponed on 13 May 2013 because the national team coach was stuck in Jordan waiting for a permit to enter.

The clubs behind the national team sit a few kilometres apart and a checkpoint away from each other.

The Irish Times, reporting from the West Bank in July 2023, called Diyar in Bethlehem and Sareyyet in Ramallah the two most important clubs in Palestinian women's football, with a real rivalry between them and a steady flow of players from both into the national side.

Its headline quoted players describing Israeli military tear gas fired onto the pitch "just to prevent us from training".

The paper introduced Loreen Tanas, then 24, arriving at Diyar training after a shift at the restaurant where she worked, back after a six-month break — the ordinary economics of a game with no professional wages behind it.

Vashti Media put the pre-war shape of the domestic game at 15 clubs in the West Bank and six in Gaza. The scale of the women's audience was established early: Wikipedia's account of football in Palestine records an estimated 8,000 people at the opening match of the women's national league at Faisal al-Husseini Stadium on 10 February 2011.

What that league is doing now is not visible in the public record.

The federation's own last detailed women's league announcement retrievable online is from October 2023, setting out the draw for the women's Elite League — a single group played in three stages — alongside an under-14 club futsal championship of 16 teams, with Sareyyet Ramallah, Diyar, Beit Liqya, Safa, Al-Eizariya, the Orthodox Cultural Club of Beit Sahour and Beit Safafa among the named clubs.

No fixtures, table or champion for a 2025–26 women's league season appears in the federation material available. The men's West Bank Premier League was suspended in October 2023 and has not, on the published record, resumed a completed season.

The grounds themselves are part of the accounting. WAFA's tally of damage to Palestinian sport states that 269 sports facilities in Gaza were destroyed wholly or partly, along with the federation and Olympic committee headquarters and clubs including Khadamat al-Shati, Khadamat Rafah and Ittihad Khan Younis, and that 20 facilities in the West Bank were destroyed wholly or partly.

The programme keeps moving anyway. In June 2026 the federation opened a level-C coaching course with Al-Quds University for 26 coaches, women among them, and announced that the under-17 girls' team had been drawn with hosts Jordan and Bahrain for the sixth WAFF girls' championship, scheduled for 17 to 26 July, with seven teams entered. No result for that tournament appears in the federation items retrieved.

The senior team's most recent outing on the federation's own news page was a friendly defeat to Jordan in June. Captain Sireen Ghattas leads both the eleven-a-side and futsal sides, the latter ranked 30th in the world in FIFA's December 2025 list — the highest ranking any Palestinian national team currently holds.