The remarkable resilience of Palestinian women’s football
The Palestinian women’s national football team play against the Bohemians in Dublin, May 2024
Gabriel Stewart reports in Vashti on 21 October 2025:
In July 2022, a group of girls from Gaza travelled to the West Bank for an under-16s tournament. Their team, Al Mashtal (“The Nursery”), would go on to win the competition. The victory was expected to catalyse a growing women’s football scene in Gaza.
“They had dreams. They wanted to play for the national team, and they were very excited young players, young talents,” explains Dima Said, a coach for the Palestinian Women’s national team. Now Said doesn’t know where many of those girls are. “We have lost contact with them, their club has been completely destroyed.”
All domestic football competitions were immediately suspended in October 2023. Since then, hundreds of footballers have been killed and hundreds of sporting facilities partially or completely destroyed across the West Bank and Gaza in the last two years.
Meanwhile, sporting venues which remained physically intact were regularly seized and repurposed by Israeli forces. Gaza’s Yarmouk Stadium became the site of an Israeli detention centre in December 2023. Images of stripped men surrounded by tanks inside the ground were beamed across the world. It has since been demolished, and its remains are being used as a refugee camp.
Despite this level of destruction at home, the Palestinian national teams have played on. The women recently returned from a set of qualifiers for the 2026 Asian Cup in which they beat their hosts Tajikistan 3-0. To Said, a former captain herself, the continuation is about more than just sportsmanship: “It’s about identity and the hope we possess as Palestinian people. For young girls, seeing their team continue gives them reason to believe in the future, even with the most devastating situations.”