Marwan Barghouti and the World Cup
“Marwan Barghouti is a devoted and exceptional lover of football. While following the World Cup, he would transform into an innocent and mischievous child.”
Football is the most popular sport in Palestine. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off amid innumerable controversies, most Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will be glued to their phones to catch up on the latest developments in the month-long tournament. Like most things in Palestine, however, even the love for the beautiful game is tainted by blood and suffering. On July 16, 2014, the Israelis killed four boys from the Bakr family — Ahed (9 years), Zakaria (10 years), Mohammed (11 years), and Ismail (9 years) — while they were playing football on a beach in Gaza. Six other civilians were also wounded in the missile attack, including four children from the same extended Bakr family.
Israel has been killing Palestinian footballers for years. The lead-up to the World Cups would often see graphics showing a potential Palestinian playing eleven, but with a cruel twist: most players in the team sheet would be either dead or would have had their limbs amputated as a result of Israeli violence.
The ongoing barbarism in the Gaza Strip has taken the assault on Palestinian football to a whole new level.
In August 2025, the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) said that 421 football players were among the 808 athletes killed in Gaza over the past 22 months, nearly half of them children. Among those killed was Palestinian national team player Suleiman al-Obaid, who was known as the Palestinian Pelé for his heroics on the pitch.
Israel’s war on Palestinian football extends beyond the killing of players and the destruction of stadiums. It reaches into prison cells, where Palestinian detainees are routinely denied even a semblance of normalcy. Isolated from the rest of the world, Palestinian detainees are even denied the opportunity to watch games or even learn the scores of their teams. In this way, football becomes yet another arena of deprivation within Israeli incarceration.
Yet, the game’s grip on the Palestinian imagination endures, even behind bars.
Bassem Khandaqji, who was released from Israeli rape and torture dungeons during the Flood of the Free deal last year, recently wrote a story for Ultra Palestine about Marwan Barghouti’s love for football and how Barghouti is denied the opportunity to follow and cheer for his favourites, the Brazilian national team and Real Madrid.
Khandaqji, a renowned author and the 2024 winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his book A Mask, the Colour of the Sky — which he wrote in prison — uses Barghouti’s prison experience to tell the story of how the Israelis steal even the simplest joys from the Palestinians.
Bassem Khandaqji
Did you know that Marwan Barghouti passionately and enthusiastically supports Brazil in the World Cup?
Did you also know that he is an avid supporter of Spain’s Real Madrid?
Yes, I will tell you about Marwan Barghouti the human being, the child, and the football enthusiast.
When I was with him in the colonial Hadarim Prison, located in the heart of Palestine, the Zionist fascists deprived him of the opportunity to watch the 2018 World Cup by placing him in isolation so that he could not follow the tournament or watch his favourite team, Brazil. Imagine, then, had the Palestinian national team qualified for the World Cup finals during that period.
Marwan Barghouti is a devoted and exceptional lover of football. While following the World Cup, he would transform into an innocent and mischievous child. His pure laughter would echo throughout the prison whenever he learned that his favourite team or club had won a particular competition.
Until the Zionist fascists decided to place him in solitary confinement and deprive him of following the 2018 World Cup, transferring him from Hadarim Prison to another isolation facility. The aim, on the part of the Zionist security establishment, was to torment Marwan Barghouti by denying him the ability to follow the tournament and learn the results of his beloved Brazil.
For Palestinian and Arab prisoners in the prisons of Zionist colonialism, it came as a shock and a surprise that the Zionist colonial apartheid system was so determined to prevent Marwan Barghouti from knowing about or following Brazil’s matches in the World Cup.
Yes, colonialism resides in the small and invisible details, driven by an obsession with domination and control over everything that allows Palestinians to exercise their humanity naturally and peacefully.
That is what Marwan Barghouti sought — and continues to seek — in prison: the preservation of his humanity, vitality, and passion for football, even as a national leader of the Palestinian people.
I was there with him, in the depths of the prisons of the Zionist apartheid regime. I witnessed his excitement, enthusiasm, and childlike joy whenever his favourite team won a match. The echoes of his laughter would reverberate through the prison cells. At times, I felt that Marwan Barghouti’s laughter inside the prisons of Zionist colonialism represented not only a victory for him and for us as Palestinian prisoners, but a victory for humanity itself.
Marwan Barghouti — my brother, my father, my comrade — what is his condition now amid the brutality of Zionist fascism? He is exhausted. Tired. Hungry. Worn down by the savagery of innovative and lethal Zionist policies of killing. Yet, in the midst of suffering, he still seeks to fulfil a simple childlike joy: cheering for his favourite team in the World Cup.
Yes, I was there with him and I know him well. I know that spontaneous spirit flowing through the harsh rhythm of prison, with all its brutality and inhumanity. I know the enthusiasm with which he would greet me, especially since he and I support the same national team and football club.
Now the World Cup approaches, while Marwan Barghouti, his comrades, and his fellow prisoners remain incarcerated in the prisons of the Zionist colonial apartheid system. Despite the prisoners’ overriding priority of steadfastness and survival, Marwan Barghouti and his fellow prisoners — enduring extreme hunger, suffering, and hellish conditions — still seek to reclaim their humanity by following the World Cup, without the slightest interference from a fascist colonial prison guard whose sole objective is to confiscate Palestinians’ joy and passion for supporting and following their favourite teams and clubs in international football competitions.
And today, Marwan Barghouti does not know when the World Cup matches will begin, whether his favourite team — after Palestine, of course — has qualified, or where this tournament, which means so much to the peoples of the world, will be held.
Marwan is there now, at the height of the genocide being perpetrated against him and against Palestinian and Arab prisoners in the prisons of the Zionist colonial apartheid regime. Yes, he is there. Hungry. Exhausted. Suffering. In pain. Yet, with all the imagination, love, enthusiasm, hope, and childlike wonder he possesses, he dreams of seeing his favourite team win the World Cup.
Indeed, Marwan Barghouti is not merely a national leader who has struggled and continues to struggle on behalf of his steadfast people. He is also a human being. That is what I came to know when I was with him in the prisons of Zionist colonialism. His boisterous excitement would seem to overcome the prison’s walls and fences whenever his favourite club or national team won a match. Imagine, then, if that match were the struggle of an entire people yearning for freedom and humanity.
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Would be great if you could share more of these sad but beautiful cultural stories 💓💔
Sports? Psychological release? For a Palestinian? You know the Ziofilth knee-jerk to that is violent recrimination. Football or whatever slight mental diversion: not permitted to amalek.