On June 2, Israeli forces abducted four female Birzeit University students in raids across Occupied Palestine: Natalie Abu Diah, seized from student housing, Jolan Abu Awwad, Sama Safi, Leila Na’el Khalil, forced from their family homes. Natalie Abu Diah is a former member of the Palestine national football team. A current member, due to play in an international against Malaysia this coming weekend, is 20-year-old Rand Al Halawani, summoned on the same day to and then arrested in a West Jerusalem police station.
Birzeit University and the Palestine Football Association have condemned what is an ongoing and systemic targeting of students and athletes, part of a well-documented wider pattern aimed at crippling Palestinian education and sport. Irish Sport for Palestine and Belfast Friends of Birzeit University add their voices to those of the PFA and Birzeit University to deplore and demand an end to Israel’s deliberate athleticide and scholasticide. Israel cannot be allowed to inflict on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Gazan levels of butchery, devastation and destruction.
Israel systematically targets Palestinian sporting life by attacking, killing, maiming, imprisoning and restricting movement of Palestinians. According to the PFA, at least 1008 sportspeople have been killed and nearly 300 sports facilities have been destroyed by Israel since October 2023. In addition are debilitating injuries, psychological trauma, the disruption of sports programmes, careers, and aspirations.
Within four months of launching its genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel had destroyed the last of Gaza’s 11 universities, leaving 88,000 students unable to continue their studies. Israel also deliberately assassinated Gaza’s top echelon of academics, including Refaat Alareer, Professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. A renowned poet, beloved teacher, killed in December 2023 in a targeted airstrike.
The deliberate destruction of educational and sporting infrastructure in Gaza and Occupied Palestine is part of Israel’s intent to dismantle the very foundations of Palestinian society, depriving the Palestinian people of their fundamental rights, Palestinian children of their future.
Irish Sport for Palestine and Belfast Friends of Birzeit demand an end to the impunity enjoyed by Israel that allows it to maim and murder, imprison and torture, humiliate and rape, the defenceless and the vulnerable, those to whom it has a duty of care as an occupying force.
The Israel Football Association must be suspended from FIFA and UEFA for continued statute breaches relating to illegal settlement clubs, of which there are now at least 10 in Occupied Palestine.
All universities should review their relationships with Israeli higher education and all academics with their Israeli counterparts.
Free the students. Free the athletes. Free the imprisoned. Free Palestine.
FORSEA
Further Readings:
- Russia Out, Israel In: The Double Standard of International Sport
- UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza
- 800 martyrs: How ‘Israel’ has relentlessly targeted athletes in Gaza and the West Bank
- Israel’s Deliberate Destruction of Palestinian Academia
- Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide
- GENOCIDE-A NEW TERM AND NEW CONCEPTION FOR
DESTRUCTION OF NATIONS Raphael Lemkin, 1944.
