While Italy hosts the Winter Olympics, Palestinian sports leaders come to Rome to denounce what they define as “the impact of Israeli aggression on the Palestinian sports sector”. Both in Gaza and in the West Bank.
“Sport is a natural right that Palestinians lack and this is unfair,” he declares Jibril Rjoubpresident of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and the Palestinian Football Federation. Rjoub wears a keffiyeh around his neck and meets journalists at the headquarters of the Palestinian Embassy in Rome, as a guest of the ambassador Mona Abuamarasitting in front of a wall on which photographs of Arafat and Abu Mazen hang.
The data collected by the Palestinian sports authorities are impressive: between October 2023 and August 2025, the Palestinian casualties in the world of sport (the document defines them as “martyrs”) are 684, belonging to 34 sports federations and institutions. The majority of victims (367) are registered among members of the football federation: players, coaches, referees, administrators, club presidents. There were also the deaths of 54 Scouts and 31 members of the karate federation. 37 females were killed. 26% of the victims were aged between 6 and 20 years.
Among the victims there are prominent names in Palestinian sport, such as the former footballer Sulaiman Al-Abeed, nicknamed “the Palestinian Pelé”, who died at the age of 41 under the bombing of Gaza.
The damage to structures is enormous. Dozens of stadiums, gyms and sports fields were reduced to rubble. Jibfril Rjoub denounces the particular destruction of the historic stadium Al-Yarmouk. “During the conflict,” says Rjoub, “the Israeli armed forces transformed the stadium into a detention camp in which Palestinians were subjected to humiliating treatment in inhumane conditions. The destruction of the stadium represents not only the physical demolition of a sports infrastructure, but also the erasure of a cultural heritage and collective memory of the Palestinians.”
The president of the Olympic Committee says that the Israeli government, through the Ministry of Defense, has vetoed the donation by the Chinese government of synthetic turf to rebuild the football fields. “We are prevented from feeling happy. If they could, the Israelis would even take away our oxygen”, Rjoub enthuses.
He is sitting next to him Ehab Abu Jazarformer footballer and coach of the Palestinian men’s national football team. Tomorrow he will be awarded by Renzo Ulivieri, president of the (AIAC), Italian Football Coaches Association, with the “Special AIAC 2025 Bench”. regular championship”.
Valerie Taraziswimmer (she represented Palestine at the 2024 Paris Olympics), born in the United States to an Orthodox Christian family originally from Gaza, explains that as an athlete she didn’t like the booing of the Israeli team present at the Milan Cortina Olympics. “Booting is against the Olympic spirit and no athlete should be booed,” she says, adding that she has no problem competing, as she has already done, in competitions with athletes from Israel. Tarazi, however, underlines that “practicing a sport is part of fundamental human rights and this right cannot be exercised in Palestine today”.
