The Palestinian Football Association confirmed on Wednesday what the stadium had already heard: Mahmoud Kamal Fares Abdel-Malek is dead. The captain and goalkeeper of Gaza Sports Club was killed in an Israeli air strike on Tuesday, Al Jazeera reported, targeted in the attack on Sabra, the neighbourhood on the southern edge of Gaza City.
Only recently, Abdel-Malek had stood in goal for the final of the Thousand Martyrs Cup — a tournament whose name is itself a casualty count, a competition staged among the ruins so that something resembling ordinary life might continue. In Gaza, football has never been only football; it is one of the last rituals the war has not entirely confiscated. Now the goalkeeper joins the martyrs the cup is named for.
His death came a year into a ceasefire in which the dying has never properly stopped — a truce on paper whose signature has not reached Sabra.
The water
South of Gaza City, in Deir el-Balah, the enemy this week was not overhead but underfoot. Gaza is digging out from catastrophic flooding after storms submerged displacement camps and war-destroyed cities, Maram Humaid reported for Al Jazeera. The heavy rain has directly affected 106,000 people, according to UNICEF — thousands of tents holding displaced families gone under the water, latrines overflowing into the camps where children walk.
Survivors told Al Jazeera of a horror that belongs to no military communiqué: a sandbank collapsing in Deir el-Balah and burying families alive under it. A war that has already destroyed their homes drove them into tents; the tents drove them to the edge of a dune; and the dune, when the rain loosened it, came down on top of them.
Our neighbours are gone
It had been coming all week. This is Gaza’s fourth winter in tents, and it opened with storms that flooded tens of thousands of makeshift shelters, sent 1,500 calls for help through the emergency lines and threatened bomb-damaged buildings with collapse — while shelter supplies waited at Gaza’s borders.
A goalkeeper in Sabra, buried by a bomb. A family in Deir el-Balah, buried by sand. Between them, a strip of land where a million displaced people wait out another winter, and where the truce is a word spoken in capitals while the sky and the ground, each in its season, continue their work.