The Story the BBC Won’t Tell: Palestinian Football’s Dead

The BBC published a long, carefully reported feature this morning about Israeli football’s “golden generation” — the Under-20 side that reached the semi-finals of their World Cup in 2023, the Arab and Jewish players who prayed side by side, the promise of a team that might model coexistence for a divided country. It quoted a historian who called it a moment of hope. It quoted an Israeli Arab international who described teammates as brothers regardless of faith. It gave real space to racism inside Israeli football and to the players who have paid a professional price for expressing sympathy with Palestinians. As sports journalism about Israeli football specifically, it was not a whitewash.

But it was also a story about a war that has, by the count of the sport’s own governing body in Palestine, killed more than a thousand athletes — told almost entirely through the eyes of the country doing the killing. The war appears in that article as backdrop: something that happened to Israeli players’ friendships, their online mentions, their national mood. It does not appear as something that happened, overwhelmingly and by a difference of scale that makes comparison almost obscene, to Palestinian football itself. That absence is the story this piece exists to correct.

The Numbers Nobody Puts in the Headline

The Palestinian Football Association’s count of sports figures killed by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023, has climbed steadily and grimly through the war: roughly 400 sportspeople including 245 footballers by July 2024; 546 sports figures and 353 footballers, 91 of them children, by mid-2024; 724 athletes and scouts including 382 footballers by January 2025; nearly 800 athletes and 437 footballers by mid-2025; and, as of a Palestinian sports official’s statement in late August 2026, 1,014 Palestinian athletes, coaches, referees and federation officials killed in total. The PFA itself has cautioned that its own figures are almost certainly undercounts, given the number of people believed to remain missing under rubble and the restricted access to large parts of Gaza throughout the war.

These are not the wartime dead in general — the more than 60,000 to 70,000 Palestinians the United Nations and Gaza’s Health Ministry estimate have been killed since October 2023, a toll the BBC’s own Israel-focused feature mentions only in a single clause. These are specifically footballers, coaches, referees and administrators: people whose relationship to the sport was direct, documented and, in many cases, professionally registered with the PFA before the war reduced their file to a name on a casualty list.

Ninety-six of the confirmed footballer deaths recorded by early 2025 were children. Two hundred and eighty-six were young men. The PFA has recorded these figures using player registration data and reports from its Gaza branch — the same kind of institutional record-keeping that, when a European federation produces it, is treated as simply factual.

The Infrastructure Was Not Spared Either

Israeli strikes have destroyed or partially destroyed 288 sports facilities in Gaza and the West Bank, according to PFA figures released in mid-2025, including at least 134 football-specific facilities in Gaza alone. Roughly 90 per cent of Gaza’s sporting infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed since October 2023. Football pitches have, in multiple documented instances, been repurposed as makeshift cemeteries. In January 2024, footage emerged showing Israeli forces using Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City — the territory’s principal football venue — as a temporary detention site for Palestinian men and boys, some of them stripped and filmed by soldiers.

The Lajee Celtic club, a well-known Palestinian youth football initiative based in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem, was forced to stop operating altogether in December 2023, its coaches unable to guarantee the safety of children travelling to training.

The Palestinian Pelé

Individual names carry weight that aggregate statistics cannot. Suleiman al-Obeid, a striker known across Gaza as the “Palestinian Pelé” for his technical ability during a playing career that included appearances for the Palestinian national team, was killed in an Israeli strike in southern Gaza in August 2025 while reportedly waiting near an aid distribution point. He was one of hundreds of individually named, individually mourned footballers whose deaths the PFA has documented by name, club and position — a level of specificity that the phrase “footballers killed” can make abstract if it is not insisted upon.

Hani Al-Masdar, assistant coach of the Palestine Olympic football team and a well-known former player, was among the earliest sporting casualties of the war, killed in an Israeli airstrike in January 2024.

What FIFA Has Actually Done

The BBC feature does not mention that the Palestinian Football Association formally petitioned FIFA in March 2024 to suspend the Israel Football Association — citing IFA complicity in violations of international law, discrimination against Arab players, and the inclusion of clubs based in illegal West Bank settlements within Israel’s domestic league structure. FIFA president Gianni Infantino promised an independent legal assessment and an “extraordinary council meeting” to decide the matter by July 2024.

That meeting did not produce a suspension. It did not produce one in October 2024, when the review was delayed again. It did not produce one in 2025. In March 2026, FIFA formally declined to suspend Israel, instead fining the IFA 150,000 Swiss francs and finding it had breached FIFA’s anti-discrimination statutes over racism at clubs including Beitar Jerusalem — whose fans have chanted “may your village burn” and “death to Arabs” at matches for over a decade, and whose ultras burned down their own club’s offices in 2013 in protest at the signing of two Muslim players. The PFA has since appealed that decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, where it remains unresolved.

The contrast with FIFA’s treatment of Russia — suspended from all competitions within days of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, without a legal review process stretched across two years — has been noted by Palestinian officials and international human rights lawyers alike. An independent legal assessment commissioned in 2024 reportedly supported elements of the PFA’s case. FIFA proceeded with a fine.

What the “Hope” Framing Leaves Out

None of this is to say the human story the BBC told is false. Anan Khalaili’s use of “Am Yisrael,” Ofir Haim’s multi-faith dressing room, Beram Kayal’s account of praying beside a Jewish teammate — these are real testimonies about real people, and they deserve to be reported honestly, as the BBC did. Israeli Arab footballers exist inside a country that is, by its own football association’s disciplinary record, host to persistent racism against them, and it is genuinely difficult and often dangerous for them to speak about Gaza publicly, as Dia Saba’s exile from Maccabi Haifa after his wife’s Instagram post demonstrates.

But a feature that spends several thousand words on the emotional texture of Israeli football’s relationship to October 7 and the war that followed, while allocating a single UN casualty figure in a single sentence to the more than 60,000 Palestinians killed and barely a clause to Palestinian football itself, has made an editorial choice about whose grief is the subject and whose is the context. Israel’s “golden generation” reached a World Cup semi-final in 2023 and, four months later, watched a war begin that would kill more than a thousand people from Palestinian sport alone — footballers, referees, coaches, children training on pitches that would later be bombed or turned into detention centres or graveyards. That is not a footnote to Israeli football’s story. It is a separate catastrophe, with its own names, its own numbers, and its own football association that has spent two years asking FIFA, without success, to treat it as more than an inconvenience on the meeting agenda.

The BBC told you about the dressing room where a Muslim player and a Jewish player prayed side by side. It did not tell you that, in the same period, 1,014 people from the other side of that same sport were killed. Both stories are true. Only one of them made it into that headline.