Palestine will not be at the 2026 World Cup. The national team has never qualified for the competition, because producing a suitable squad has been close to impossible in the face of occupation, blockade, and now genocide. Still, in Gaza, people will watch this year’s tournament in makeshift shelters and what’s standing of their bombed-out homes. The game will carry the same meaning for people there it always has, even at such a remove from the spaces where it first took on its significance: pitches, playgrounds, and living rooms where radio broadcasts fluctuated in and out, most of which are now in ruins.

Many family photos of a kind often found in Palestinian homes will be buried in the rubble: a father, an uncle, or an older brother wearing a football jersey, his arms spread wide and his grin even wider, standing on a pitch of cracked concrete or compressed earth with a net that is probably torn, if there is one at all. None of that registers in his expression. In the frame, the game briefly becomes the whole world.

For most of my life, watching football on television was a challenge that required collective triangulation. During the 2010 World Cup, I remember blackouts were so routine in Gaza City that my family always had a contingency plan for the games. We watched what we could when the power held: Ghana’s incredible run unfairly halted by Luis Suarez’s goal-line handball; Germany picking Argentina apart with four clinical goals; then, Spain’s slow and dramatic victory against the Netherlands in the final.

When the lights went out, we switched to the radio. My father would work the dial slowly, hunting for a frequency on which the commentary came through clearly enough to follow. As the signal drifted, sentences would drop out mid-clause. We learned to listen for clues in the crowd’s reactions. We sat with our ears pressed up to the radio at night, accompanied by the hum of distant drones and, occasionally, the harsher sound of warplanes hovering overhead.

In 2014, on the day before Germany drubbed Brazil 7-1 in the World Cup semi-finals, Israel launched yet another war on Gaza: over the following six weeks, the IDF killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and injured over 11,000. During that match, I remember displaced family members and neighbours crowding around the radio in our living room, hoping for the broadcast to hold. The commentary cut in and out as Germany’s goals came faster than we could make sense of them. Even through the static, we could hear the disbelief in the announcer’s voice.

For generations of Palestinians, football has lived on through moments like this. Young people played matches on rooftops and in alleys, goals marked with rocks and sandals. The density of Gaza’s population intensified this culture, birthing a geography of street-level rivalries and local stars. Clubs served as social spaces and political meeting points.

Archives were assembled from pictures, neighbourhood stories and the memories of players – Suleiman Al-Obeid, ‘the Palestinian Pelé’, or Mohammed Barakat, the legend of Khan Younis – whose names we first heard on the radio, in camps and on the streets, names that still circulate long after the pitches they played on have disappeared. Even as Gaza’s infrastructure was degraded under the Israeli blockade, this sport offered a quiet form of continuity. Local leagues played on, and street matches continued.

Organised football in Palestine dates back to the British Mandate period. It arrived through familiar colonial routes – British soldiers and administrators – and was absorbed into local culture in much the same way it was everywhere else. Palestinians played the sport relentlessly, giving it meanings its original promoters never intended.

In 1928, the Palestinian Football Association was founded by Yosef Yekutieli, a Zionist who led the Maccabi athletic organisation and would later establish the Maccabiah Games, often called the Jewish Olympics. The PFA was skewed from its inception: its inaugural meeting included 14 Zionist representatives and a single Arab delegate. When its league launched three years later, there were separate regulations for Jewish and Palestinian clubs. By the time the PFA incorporated the Zionist flag into its logo in 1934, the Arab-Palestinian Sports Federation had been formed to run its own tournaments.

During the Arab Revolt of 1936, British authorities shut down Palestinian clubs for doubling as platforms for political organising; the APSF disbanded under this pressure. It was re-established by Arab clubs when their suspension ended. Among the most prominent teams of this era were the Orthodox Sports Club of Jerusalem, the Islamic Sports Club of Jaffa, and Shabab Al-Arab of Haifa, which won the federation’s last two championships before the Nakba.

After 1948, the APSF disbanded again, this time for good. Clubs that had anchored urban football cultures in cities such as Haifa dispersed or scattered. Shabab Al-Arab ceased to exist. The Orthodox Sports Club and the Islamic Sports Club dissolved alongside the cities they were part of. In the refugee camps of Lebanon, some clubs reformed under new names, borrowing directly from the areas their members had fled: Jaffa, Haifa and Jenin all played in makeshift leagues in Beirut. Players resurfaced as well, in camp leagues across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Matches became part of daily life for the displaced, allowing them to claim roots even if the places they once lived in were gone.

The Palestinian Football Association was relaunched as an Arab institution in 1962, and was admitted, following the Oslo Accords, as a full member of FIFA in 1998. But this did not change the actual conditions of Palestinian football. For decades, Israeli coordination permits were required to travel from Gaza to the West Bank – a necessity for domestic competitions. These were often denied without explanation or revoked at short notice.

Because players based in Palestine are rarely able to travel abroad, the national team now draws heavily from the diaspora. One instructive case: in 2009, Mahmoud Sarsak, a Gazan player for Balata Youth, was detained at a border crossing on his way to the West Bank for national team training. Accused of being an unlawful combatant, he was detained without trial or formal charges for three years and only released after a three-month hunger strike. In the squad that contested the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, 25 of 27 players were contracted to clubs in Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Belgium, Chile and the US. Gazans were largely unable to participate.

The very notion of playing at “home” has long been compromised. Palestine’s matches are frequently staged abroad – in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait or wherever arrangements can be made. The national team did not play a recognised game on its own territory until October 2008: a 1-1 with Jordan at the Faisal Al-Husseini Stadium in the West Bank.

That same stadium, the closest thing Palestine has to a national ground, has itself been repeatedly restricted, damaged and closed by Israeli military operations. Palestine Stadium in Gaza has fared even worse. In 2006, after an Israeli strike left a massive crater in the centre of the pitch, FIFA funded its repair and renovation. When the stadium was bombed again in 2012, over 50 players, including Eden Hazard and Demba Ba, signed a petition calling for Israel to not host the Under-21 European championship the following year.

Administrative buildings have not been spared, either. The PFA’s offices in Gaza have been destroyed more than once; facilities in the West Bank have been raided or closed. While football institutions in most countries accumulate history gradually, Palestinian football has had to rebuild those spaces again and again.

After 7 October 2023, Israeli forces repeatedly bombarded Palestine Stadium and demolished Al Yarmouk, both in Gaza City. They reportedly used Al Yarmouk as a detention and interrogation site. Following their withdrawal, the stadium’s remains were converted into a refugee camp. Other pitches and stands, where generations first learned to play the game, are now shelters.

Dozens of footballers have been killed by Israeli fire. Hani Al-Masdar, the Olympic team’s coach, was killed by an air strike in January 2024, days before his players competed at the Asian Cup in Doha. Mohammed Barakat was killed by an Israeli strike on his home during the first morning of Ramadan that year. Imad Abu Tima, who had represented Palestine’s under-20 national team, was killed a few months later, alongside nine of his family members in Khan Younis. Suleiman Al-Obeid was shot dead while waiting for humanitarian aid in August 2025. As of this March, the PFA had confirmed the deaths of 565 football players.

FIFA membership used to carry symbolic weight for a people without sovereign statehood. Since the Israeli siege, the sport’s governing body has issued tepid statements expressing concern over the situation in Gaza. It has not banned Israel, however, despite taking similar action against Russia for launching a full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. This February, it announced a $75 million partnership with Donald Trump’s Board of Peace for “development” in Gaza, which will include, according to their AI-generated promotional video, a stadium built amid tents.

Despite these entanglements with power, money and nationalism, Palestine’s football culture has still found a way to persevere. In 2024, the national team made an unexpected run in the Asian Cup, bowing out to Qatar in the quarterfinals in a tight 2-1 loss. They qualified again for the 2027 edition, finishing second in a group with Australia, Lebanon and Bangladesh. While the results are important, they matter less than the fact that the game itself persists. As long as there is football, there is some hope that somehow, someday, ordinary life might be possible again.

This piece was published in collaboration with Golden Goal, a magazine about the intersection of politics, culture and sport at the 2026 World Cup. To read more, visit their website: goldengoal.world.