Israeli football feeling the pressure as Gaza genocide backlash grows
Sulaiman Al-Obaid, 1984-2025
Nadav Rapaport reports in Middle East Eye on 4 September 2025:
Last month Suleiman al-Obeid, a footballer known as the “Palestinian Pele”, was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza while queuing for food.
“Obeid wasn’t just a friend and former teammate on the national team, he was one of the most talented and ambitious players I’d ever known,” Mohammad Abu Aita, a former Palestinian national team player, told Middle East Eye. “He had a beautiful spirit and was a role model for young athletes.”
Israel, Palestinian Football Association (PFA) chairman Jibril Rajoub said, has caused “a catastrophe without precedent” to Palestinian sport.
Israel has now killed 774 Palestinian athletes and officials, including 355 footballers, according to the PFA. Close to 300 sports facilities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank have been destroyed by Israel.
“In Gaza, it’s hard to talk about sport at all. Stadiums have been destroyed, sports centres have been damaged, and the players, like all the residents of the Gaza Strip, are busy with daily survival,” Fadi Mustafa, a journalist at Sport 5, an Israeli channel, told MEE.
“Sport is not on the agenda now,” Mustafa said, adding that for Palestinian football in the occupied West Bank, despite the existence of “an active league, it is an exhausting daily struggle”.
Despite this, Fifa, football’s governing body, and Uefa, the sport’s governing body in Europe, have not banned Israel from their competitions and have avoided ruling on whether the Israeli Football Association should be sanctioned. This course of action has led to accusations of double standards, with Russia swiftly banned following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In Israel, though, the mounting worldwide pressure can be felt.
“Even if it is not yet officially expressed, the unofficial pressure has a real impact,” Mustafa said. “Football stars are exposed and, in some cases, even pay a price for every tweet, comment or like,” he told MEE. “What happens on social media could decide their future,” he added, referring to Israeli players abroad.