‘Losing three years set us back 20’: Palestinian football’s future in peril

Sheikh Jarrah, Occupied East Jerusalem — It’s nearly three years since Mahdi Hijazi last played a professional game of football, with the war on Gaza sinking the domestic Palestinian league into limbo.

The 23-year-old now spends his days on the sidelines of a series of football pitches adjacent to the Israeli police headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem. The area has faced rounds of evictions of Palestinian families by Israeli authorities over the years, to be replaced by Israeli settlers.

Hijazi, who played for the Palestinian national team and travelled abroad with Hilal Al-Quds, Jerusalem’s most decorated club, can be seen handing out refreshments to the players, desperate to hang on to the game he loves in any way possible.

“Football is in our blood. Winning, losing – football is beautiful, it’s life… we breathe football,” he told Al Jazeera. “For three years, there’s been no sporting activity at all. Things are hard, you keep yourself in shape through workouts at the gym… Our only concern right now is to get back to football.”

Hilal Al-Quds has been a part of Hijazi’s life since birth. His grandfather founded the club, and he came up through its ranks as a youth to compete for the first team, playing games across Asia.

But the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 – and the subsequent genocide in Gaza – has changed everything.

Nobody knows when the Palestine Professional League – suspended since the war on Gaza began – will return, putting the future of Palestinian football in peril.

Palestinian football squads were typically stitched together from players across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but an Israeli military offensive in the occupied territory has made travel there exceedingly difficult. Officials say that a surge in settler attacks and the closure of West Bank roads by the Israeli military, which were used to shuttle Palestinian footballers from one match to another, has made the domestic game impossible to play anyway.