Sport
Palestine's FA restarts West Bank league football after three lost seasons
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
For nearly three years there has been no league table in the occupied West Bank. Clubs kept their names and their colours, players kept training where they could, and the competition that gave the Palestinian game its spine simply stopped.
It restarts this autumn. The Palestinian Football Association has set September as the deadline for play to resume in the 2026/27 season, the specialist site Football Palestine reported in late July, and it will reopen not with a fixture list but with a cup — the Thousand Martyrs Cup, a competition designed to sort clubs back into the divisions they belong in.
The format is a concession to geography. A conventional season of twenty-two match days, home and away, is judged impractical when a drive between two league cities can take hours. The UN's humanitarian office counted 925 movement obstacles across the West Bank in December 2025, up from 849 in February of that year, with gates — the kind that open and close on a soldier's decision — the fastest-growing category.
A drive between two league cities can take hours. The cup was designed around that fact.
In Hebron, Shabab al-Khalil have been rebuilding for months. The club, run by its president Mithqal al-Jabari, appointed Abdullah al-Sidawi as manager and put him to work on players who have not had a competitive season since 2023. The break told on their readiness, al-Sidawi said, and the answer is a gradual return: six clubs have already met in a friendly tournament to shake the rust off before anything counts.
What the league feeds#
The domestic game is where the national team comes from, and the national team has spent this decade playing its best football away from home.
Palestine opened the last World Cup qualifying cycle with a goalless draw against South Korea in Seoul and beat Iraq 2-1 in Amman — a first win at that stage — before the campaign ended in June 2025 against Oman, where Oday Kharoub's goal held until a penalty deep in stoppage time.
Those players were produced by clubs, and clubs need a league. Oday Dabbagh went from the domestic game to Charleroi in Belgium; the captain Musab al-Battat plays in Jordan with al-Faisaly. The generation behind them has had three years of friendlies and no ladder to climb.
That is what September restores. Not a normal season — the cup format says as much — but a calendar, a table, and a reason for a teenager in Tulkarem or Bethlehem to be at training on a Tuesday because there is something at the end of it.
