In the rubble of Gaza, girls are fighting back — one punch at a time
Palestinian women boxers exercise on boxing moves during a training at the first women boxing centre in Gaza City, 17 January 2023
Yanar Alkayat reports in The New Arab on 24 March 2026:
Videos of young girls punching fiercely into a boxing bag, their bare feet kicking up sand between rows of refugee tents, go viral every time. But they capture more than just exercise in an unlikely setting.
For the young girls and women aged 5 to 25 at Gaza Boxing Women, their sport symbolises a deeper resistance and defiance to exist on their own terms.
“Boxing liberated a part of me,” says co-founder Rima Abu Rahma, who discovered the sport aged 21 in 2020, and persuaded male boxing coach Oussama Ayub to train her. “It made me feel like I had ownership of my body.”
What began as friends training together evolved into Gaza’s first and only boxing space for women, challenging societal stereotypes that deemed the contact sport inappropriate for women.
After their club in Gaza City was destroyed by the Israeli military in 2024, some of the members reunited with their coach in southern Gaza. Now they train with almost no equipment, amid hunger, aid blockades, limited shelter and carrying immeasurable trauma and loss. Yet they continue to box.
An unexpected beginning
“I wasn’t a very sporty person,” Rima, now 27, admits to The New Arab. Wanting to feel stronger, she searched for women’s boxing in Gaza and found Oussama, who was then coaching only younger children. “I wanted to box, and this was seen as radical. When my parents realised I wasn’t joking, they were really supportive,” she says. “Papa got me my first punching bag.”
Oussama, surprised and hesitant to train Rima, initially refused. “You know how society is, and how people view such things,” he tells The New Arab. He eventually agreed, insisting that training should be within a group.