For years, twenty-six-year-old Nagham Abu Samra trained karate with a single ambition: to compete on the international stage and qualify for the Olympic Games. Her goals weren’t out of reach—she had earned a spot on the Palestinian national karate team, and had won national titles in Gaza and across Palestine. Abu Samra became one of the most recognizable female athletes in Gaza, where opportunities for women in sports were scarce, and a role model for girls in the enclave pursuing competitive sports.
Before Israel’s war on Gaza began in 2023, Abu Samra was running the training center for women and girls that she’d opened in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, while also preparing for tournaments that could have put her on track to compete in the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics. She had already been shortlisted to represent Palestine at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and hoped to become one of the first women from Gaza to win an Olympic medal. But Abu Samra’s Olympic journey came to an abrupt halt in December 2023, when an Israeli air strike hit her family home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
The attack killed her mother and sister, and left Abu Samra with a badly injured leg and severe head injuries that put her in a coma. She woke up a month later to learn that doctors had amputated her leg to save her life. Her injuries required specialist treatment abroad, but because of Israel’s restriction on medical evacuations, it took weeks for her to be transferred to a hospital in Egypt, where she later died.
In Gaza, women’s participation in public athletic life—especially in competitive sports and public training spaces—has historically faced social and cultural constraints, shaped both by broad conservative norms in the enclave and Hamas’s conservative rule. For a generation of female athletes in Gaza who had, in the years since Hamas took power in 2007, gradually begun to claim space in sports, the war has erased a future they were still building, now replaced by loss and injury. Athletic stadiums are empty, training fields are filled with rubble, and the women who once ran across them are injured, displaced, or otherwise absent.
Figures from the Palestinian Football Association indicate that more than 1,000 Gazan athletes, coaches, referees, and other members of the enclave’s sports community have been killed since the start of the war in October 2023. The scale of losses has disrupted organized sports across Gaza, affecting both professional competition and grassroots training programs.
More than half of the athletes, coaches, referees, and administrators killed have been from the soccer community. In August 2025, Suleiman al-Obeid, one of Palestine’s best-known soccer players, was killed by Israeli forces while waiting near an aid distribution center in Gaza. Known as the “Pelé of Palestine,” al-Obeid represented the Palestinian national team in twenty-four international matches, won several league titles with clubs in Gaza and the West Bank, and was the top scorer in the Palestinian league for two consecutive seasons.
“Sports facilities have been destroyed alongside the athletes who trained in them,” says Nelly al-Masri, a sports journalist and researcher in Gaza. “International sporting bodies often issue statements of condolence when a well-known player dies, yet remain largely silent when hundreds of Palestinian athletes are killed in Gaza.”
Courtesy of Nelly al-Masri
Sports journalist Nelly al-Masri documents a sporting event in Gaza.
Mariam Sayyam, a women’s soccer coach in Gaza, says the impact on female sports has been especially devastating.
“I never imagined the war would continue for two years with this level of destruction,” Sayyam says. “I had built teams of girls of different age groups, and it felt as though the dream was close—the dream that women’s sport in Gaza could finally have its own place and its own voice.”
Al-Masri, who used to cover sporting events in the enclave, says the death and destruction has affected nearly every sport, including volleyball, boxing, basketball, taekwondo, gymnastics, and judo. Israeli bombing has damaged or destroyed 265 sporting facilities across Gaza, according to Palestinian sporting bodies, which warn that the scale of destruction has left organized sports in the territory in a dire state.
“Stadiums that were once full of life are now silent ruins,” Al-Masri says. “The stands that once echoed with cheers are filled with grief, and football pitches have become rubble or shelters for displaced families.”
Among the sites hit were a stadium funded by the United Nations Development Programme in the southern city of Rafah and the headquarters of a local equestrian club, both of which are reported to have been completely destroyed. Other facilities affected include a football club in Jabalia in northern Gaza, a baseball and softball field in a coastal refugee camp, and the offices of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and the Palestinian Football Association.
Several of Gaza’s main stadiums, including Palestine Stadium in Gaza City and Khan Yunis Sports City in the south, have also been damaged, along with dozens of smaller community sports grounds.
As the death toll in the war has risen to at least 72,773 as of February, some sports fields have been turned into temporary burial sites because cemeteries have become inaccessible or full. One soccer pitch near the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza has been used to bury bodies when families were unable to reach nearby graveyards.
For coaches like Sayyam, the loss is not only measured in lives, but in futures that will never be realized.
“We were building something,” she said. “We were close.”
Now, for many of Gaza’s women athletes, the path to stadiums and international competitions has been replaced by displacement, injury, and grief—dreams of medals replaced with the struggle to survive.