After three years of war: Palestinian football return to action.
This coming weekend, for the first time since October 7, 2023, Palestinian club football will be played again — in a unique and ambitious competition whose format is still not entirely clear even to those running it.
Last month, the Palestinian Football Association unveiled the "Cup of the 1,000 Martyrs" at a press conference: a tournament featuring 226 clubs, 140 of them from the West Bank, 44 from Gaza, and another 36 arriving from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The competition is set to run through several rounds, with only the top four finishers in each region advancing to a second, knockout-format stage. It has not yet been announced how the champions and runners-up from the different regions will eventually face one another. One can safely assume that, at some point, calls will emerge for a team from Gaza to travel to the West Bank, or vice versa, and for clubs to link up with Lebanon as well — all things that happened routinely in the decade before October 7, in the world that existed before the war.
The regular domestic leagues, meanwhile, will not return until the 2027/28 season at the earliest, and only if the security situation allows, per Rajoub’s declarations in August, 2026.
The opening whistle this coming Friday will sound simultaneously in three places: in the West Bank, with a match between Jabal Mukaber and Shabab Al-Khalil of Hebron; in Gaza, with the Rafah derby between Shabab Rafah and Khadamat Rafah; and in southern Lebanon, with a match between Al-Ansar (not the well-known original club of that name) and Al-Nahda.
The very fact that the tournament is being staged across these three regions carries a message of its own — one of "unifying the arenas" that the Palestinian Football Association, headed by Jibril Rajoub, clearly wants to send to the wider world.
It will be fascinating to see how much of this project — the first of its kind since the war began — actually manages to run its course as planned.
For the first time since Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian club football returns this weekend as 226 teams compete across three war-scarred regions.