Fifa Silent As Israel Detains Palestinian National Footballers

Israeli forces have detained a player on the Palestinian national women’s football team, along with a former national player, sparking renewed anger at Fifa for its failure to ban the apartheid state’s football association. 

Rand Halawani, 20, was taken on Tuesday night in Jerusalem and a court extended her detention until Friday, amid reports that her family did not know where she was being held. 

Ex-national player Natalie Abu Diyeh was also detained in the illegally occupied West Bank alongside three other young Palestinian women, AFP reported. Israel’s military claimed, without offering evidence, that the women were suspected of “terrorist-related” activity. 

Palestinians detained by Israel are at serious risk of abuse. Israeli rights group B’Tselem has found that Israel runs a “network of torture camps” where Palestinians are subjected to beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation and sexual violence. 

The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) said the players’ detention was part of a “pattern of systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes, which continues without accountability”. 

Palestinian footballers are “denied freedom of movement, safety and the basic right to participate in sport under equal conditions, rights that Fifa explicitly guarantees,” it added.

Fifa has not commented on the players’ detention, even though the PFA is a member. 

“The continued silence and inaction of the international football community… enables these illegal practices to continue with impunity,” the PFA said. 

As the federation gears up to host the World Cup in North America next week, it is under renewed scrutiny for continuing to allow the Israel Football Association (IFA) to be a member despite Israel’s long history of suppressing Palestinian sports. 

In 2014, Israeli soldiers repeatedly shot two Palestinian footballers in the feet as they returned from a training session in the West Bank, ending their careers. 

In March, Fifa’s disciplinary committee said Israel had brought “football into disrepute” and was practising a “de facto system of segregation” by excluding Palestinians from the sport and failing to take action against rampant anti-Arab racism in many clubs. 

But it stopped short of banning or suspending the country’s football association, as it did with Russia shortly after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.