2022 World Cup Appeal: Thank You!

Dear friends of Gaza Plays Peace,

Words cannot describe our gratitude.
With your help, our fundraiser was a huge success!  With your help, Gaza Plays Peace can now rent space and hire coaches for the kids, and the children of Gaza City can get new cleats, jerseys, and soccer balls.

If you’re interested in staying in touch with GPP and learning just how much your gifts can do, we’ve started a quarterly newsletter, for which you can sign up here.

“Quarterly” means you’ll only get four newsletters a year.
If you prefer to stay in touch via social media, we have a facebook page here.

At the World Cup, the Arab world rallies to Palestinian cause

Columnist Washington Post Dec 6th 2022

RAYYAN, Qatar — In the aftermath of Morocco’s sensational victory over Spain, the triumphant Moroccan squad posed for a picture with a flag. It wasn’t their own green star-on-crimson banner, nor the flag of Algeria, Tunisia or Lebanon, all of which flapped in the stands in a reflection of the Pan-Arab solidarity that has coursed through the first World Cup in the Middle East. Instead, the Moroccans waved the flag of Palestine, an explicit echo of support for a cause that has suffused the whole tournament. At the match on Tuesday evening, Palestinian emblems were everywhere, draped across people’s shoulders, on scarves, on T-shirts.

Outside the stadium beforehand, I met Mona Allaoui, a resident of Rabat, the Moroccan capital, who wore a Palestinian kaffiyeh over her Moroccan national team shirt. “I don’t care about politics,” she said, by which she meant the political normalization agreements, known as the Abraham Accords, signed between her nation’s leaders and Israel in 2020. “I support the Palestinians because I’m a human being and they are our brothers and sisters.”

At a tournament bombarded from all fronts by political concerns, the cause of Palestine is a kind of leitmotif. While authorities have from time to time blocked those sporting LGBTQ rainbows or anti-Iran regime iconography, the Palestinian flag has been ubiquitous at the World Cup’s stadiums, no matter which teams are playing. Banners calling for a “Free Palestine” were raised in the stands of at least one game, while a protester at a match involving Tunisia invaded the pitch waving a Palestinian flag. During games, fans from Arab nations have chanted for Palestinian rights and against recent killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces. They did so again Tuesday.

Interactions between Israeli journalists — invited to Qatar for the World Cup despite the absence of formal relations between both countries — and various fans they came across in Doha, Qatar, underscored the prevalence of the issue. Videos that proliferated on social media showed bemused or startled Israeli reporters being berated by passersby. In one encounter with Moroccan fans who walk away shouting “Palestine,” Raz Shechnik of Israel’s Yediot Aharonot beseeched them: “But you signed peace!”

The Abraham Accords, forged by the Trump administration, paved the way for the normalization of ties between Israel and four Arab states — the three monarchies of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, as well as Sudan. It was hailed as a major regional breakthrough and a mark of a shifting political order in the Middle East, with certain Arab powers losing interest in the entrenched struggle over Palestinian dispossession and more animated by other priorities, from countering Iran to boosting their economies. This week, Israeli President Isaac Herzog called on the royals of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in what were billed as landmark visits.

The World Cup, though, has showed how small the vision of that supposed peace is. In recent months, there has been plenty of chatter in Washington about how Israeli officials and business executives have become a common sight in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and even in Riyadh (the Saudis have yet to normalize relations with Israel, though there’s a depth of connections). But what goes often unsaid in the U.S. and Israeli conversation about these normalization deals is the extent to which they only reflect top-level elite interests in the region.

Israelis in Qatar reckoned with that reality. “There are a lot of attempts by many people here, from all around the Arab world, to come out against us because we represent normalization,” Ohad Hemo, a reporter for Israel’s Channel 12, told his network. “Israelis’ wish came true, we signed peace agreements with four Arab states, but there are also the people, and many of them don’t like our presence here.”

Some Israeli commentators saw the backlash as evidence of enduring anti-Israeli, even antisemitic sentiment in the region. “This isn’t a knock on the Abraham Accords, or even on peace with Jordan and Egypt,” wrote Lahav Harkov of the Jerusalem Post. “They are all significant and all brought positive results for Israel and for those countries. But it’s also a wake-up call about the limitations of those agreements.”

Recent polling shows that overwhelming majorities of ordinary citizens in many Arab countries, including those that participated in the Abraham Accords, disapprove of formalizing ties with Israel. “There is clearly not much love in the Arab world for Israel,” wrote Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based risk consultancy that focuses on the region. “The decades of humiliation, resentment, and anger which many Arabs feel toward Israel cannot simply vanish with the signing of such normalization agreements.”

Still key for millions of people in the Arab world, their governments aside, is the political condition of Palestinians, millions of whom live lives circumscribed by Israel’s security interests, shorn of the same rights afforded to the Israelis around them. For years, most Arab governments conditioned normalization with Israel on the advent of a separate Palestinian state. But the process to create that state has effectively collapsed, while Israel’s new far-right government contains numerous politicians who oppose any scenarios in which Palestinian statehood could ever be viable.

“Ordinary Arabs are against this occupation and see it as inhuman and unacceptable,” said Mahjoob Zweiri, a professor of history and contemporary politics at Qatar University.

Zweiri said the political tenor of the tournament in Qatar has offered a clear message not just to the United States and Israel, but to Arab governments that also seem intent on obscuring the political priorities of Palestinians. The presence of Palestinian flags at stadiums was “not organized by states, but something genuine from within the people themselves,” he said. “The World Cup is about ordinary people, it’s about middle-class people. It’s not about the elite.”

“They can talk about normalization about 100 years, but they cannot impose it,” Zweiri said.

That’s a view recognized by some in Israel. “After the Abraham Accords were signed with several Arab countries in 2020, rightist pundits claimed that the Palestinians’ fate no longer interests other Arabs,” wrote Uzi Baram in left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “They didn’t bother to read the article in the agreement stating that their fulfillment requires establishing a Palestinian state. As for the symbiosis between the Palestinians and other Arab nations, no further proof seems needed following the World Cup in Qatar.”

Aladdin Awwad, 42, a Palestinian cybersecurity specialist who works in Doha, was at Morocco’s victory over Spain. His brother had draped a Palestinian flag over the Morocco jersey he was wearing.

“It’s great to see all these Arab nationalities support our cause and show the West that Palestine will not die,” Awwad told me. “We are not here to create problems. We are not against peace. But we exist and we are here.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/06/world-cup-arab-world-rallies-palestinian-cause/?fbclid=IwAR3YaRpV0_XJvifrPRqQzFy1fCvJ52ECySkfhDEWA6qJ6RE_O2I4V3EPKnk

Gaza Plays in the World Cup!

Gaza Plays Peace Captain, Omar Ahmed. A very talented boy with much potentials. Omar plays as a striker and he loves scoring goals.

 

Khaled, the winger. What a marvelous future player. Skills and persistence will make Khaled a prominent player for GPP and Palestine.

Obaida the goalkeeper. He said once “I love to play in intense games, and I love the heavy training we have. This is the clear path of success.”

Waleed in Yellow. The Magical baller. He loves going through adventures. Waleed is the pillar of the midfield, he runs and sacrifices his efforts for the team. Waleed is the candle that lights GPP team

A crime that is still in investigation

Israeli missile vanishes the souls of four children from ONE family on Gaza beach. In 16 July, 2014 life became harder for the family of Baker, they lost their innocent boys, and up to this moment they cannot understand how come!?. Children playing soccer, is it a crime?

Israel military attacks in 2014 — “Operation Strong Cliff” started in the 8th of July till the 26th of August — was one its most crucial ever against the Palestinians who are besieged in the city GAZA on the coastal strip of land. Aside from the destruction of almost all civilian residential buildings and its disproportionate use of air strikes, among war crimes that Israel committed in that aggression was its often direct target to civilian places and camps. This was insanely the most shocking crime since Nakba. But read to know the more!

In 16 July, Eight children from Bakr family ventured onto the beachfront at Gaza City’s small port, playing near the boats that their fathers used for fishing to earn their bread. During the aggression, Israel banned all Palestinian fishermen from going out in their boats and essentially closed the port. Any fisher-man violates orders will be taken by the Israeli naval corpse.

As the four cousins – 11-year-old Mohammad Ramiz Bakr, 9-year-old Ismail Mahmoud Bakr, and Ahed Atef Bakr and Zakariya Ahed Bakr, both aged 10 – continued to play with other children from their family, Israeli forces shelled the area and the fishing boats. One of the boys was killed immediately. The other seven children started running from the beach when a second shell killed another three innocent boys.

Three other members of the Bakr family were severely injured in the attack: 13-year-old Hamad Bakr was hit by shrapnel in the chest; 11-year-old Motasem Bakr was injured in his head and legs; and Sayed Bakr injured in the back and thigh by shrapnel.

A photographer for the New York Times, Tyler Hicks, witnessed the second strike after he heard “a loud, close blast.” He then heard the second trike while grabbing his equipment, later recalling that “I saw that boy running, and by the time I thought he was already dead. That’s the image that will stay in my mind.”

Following the killing of the four boys, Israeli military confessed that it had done the strike and called it, in a bad manner , ” Tragic” claiming that it was a mistake and they have not recognized the children and thought that they were Hamas militants. International outrage followed and Israel launched its own stupid internal investigation on the killings, which was completed almost a year later in 2015.

The results of the report exonerated Israel from an obvious crime  : “The incident took place in an area that had long been known as a compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was specified to military groups.” This compound, said the Israeli statement, “spans the scale of the breakwater of the Gaza City sea shores, closed off by a fence and clearly separated from the beach serving civilians.”

This was the Israeli military claim, even though the area around which the children were playing was in the clear sight of close tourism restaurants and hotels where international journalists used to stay at all the time. All of those journalists reported that they saw no militants in that area at the time of the shelling. That is to say, the Israeli army killed those children DELIBERATLEY and it could not be a mistake or a technological ERROR, because they are just boys.

The Israeli military statement also saying that it had “carried out a number of attacks on the compound in the days prior to the incident” and, in one attack the day before, “a container was inside the compound, which used to contain military supplies, and that it was attacked lately.”

This, again, contradicts the social media accounts of many journalists who were there. The compound in question, they confirmed, was easily accessible to both fishermen and local Palestinians who visit the beach to swim or sit, therefore making it a poor location for Hamas to store military supplies. Moreover, the container that the Israeli report described used to have contained no military equipment when investigated.

August 2018 The Intercept a secret report by the Israeli military police said that the strikes were made WITHOUT authorization. According to the leaked reports, the Israeli drone operators confessed that they contacted their superiors after they killed the first child, seeking authorization for the second strike and clarification on what to do about the escaping children who they allegedly MISTOOK for militants. The report although states that “less than a minute later, the drone operators decided to launch a second missile, killing three more children, despite never getting a command to their request.”

Killing those boys was, as far as many people are concerned, a tangible evidence that Israel was targeting civilians and civilian areas indiscriminately in its numerous air and sea attacks against Gaza Strip. It symbolizes the killing of those innocents, children being regarded as blameless and easily recognized from Hamas fighters, and not connected at all to politics or any family member who is into such acts.

Three years later, Israel while at least 1,500 homes destroyed in that same 2014 aggression are still rubble

Seven years later, justice for the Bakr boys has yet to be served. Israel’s “investigation” of its OWN war crime has made sure of such thing.