Fadi Aldeeb got the call just a month before the Paralympics began asking him to return to the shot put, an event in which he hadn’t competed in years, to be the sole Palestinian representative at the Paris Games.
“When they asked me, of course I said yes because this is my country,” said the 38-year-old wheelchair basketball player from Gaza. “This experience isn’t about me, I am the voice of millions of people, to show their goals, their hopes and their successes. This is my opportunity to show the world who we are.”
Aldeeb began an intensive training schedule alongside his day job as a basketball coach. “I know how to raise our flag here but wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t just coming here to show up – I wanted to be as good as possible,” he said after placing 10th in the men’s F55 category.
He was the only athlete born in Gaza to compete in either the Olympics – for which Palestine sent an eight-strong team – or Paralympics in Paris, after a year in which many Palestinian athletes have faced obstacles to training, travel and survival.
Nader Jayousi, the technical director of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, said one boxer who “cheated death” to leave Gaza failed to qualify for the Games. Meanwhile, athletes from the West Bank faced months of interruptions during a crucial period before qualifying competitions after Israel imposed a wave of restrictions in the wake of the 7 October attacks.
“Nowhere was safe to cross from one city to another, which stopped sports,” Jayousi said. “It had a huge impact on our athletes as they were in a crucial qualifying time. We stopped everything between October and February, an important moment when athletes were supposed to be building momentum. When things restarted in February, we focused on the 12 athletes we felt could qualify, resulting in eight athletes at the Olympics, our largest delegation in some time.”
Aldeeb travelled to the Games after months of grief, mourning 17 members of his family including his brother and his nephew killed in Gaza. He received news of his brother’s death in December a day after he played in a basketball friendly in Paris, and realised he had missed the last phone call from him during the match.
The Palestinian Olympic Committee estimates that 400 Palestinian athletes have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, while training grounds and sports infrastructure have been levelled.
“Already there was very little sports equipment, and sometimes so few places to train that we would train in the street,” Aldeeb said. “For the discus, sometimes we didn’t have proper training discs so we would use replacements made of plastic. Sometimes we would overcome all of these hardships only to find we would reach the border to get to a competition and be told we couldn’t cross.”
He had embarked on what he describes as “the start of a new life” after he was shot in the spine in 2001 during the Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada. The UN’s committee for disability rights said in May that prior to the current war in Gaza about a fifth of all households in the territory reported having at least one member with disabilities, and it said the figure could have soared in the past months.
Palestinian health officials estimate that more than 94,000 people have been injured since October, while the World Health Organization has said the war “has resulted in thousands of amputations, including early estimates of over 1,000 children, all of whom have immediate and lifelong needs.”
For Aldeeb, the course of his new life was tied to sport, competing internationally in basketball and athletics, including winning medals in shot put, javelin and discus. “I wanted to fly so I chose athletics,” he said. After a shoulder injury in 2012, he focused on his love of wheelchair basketball.
He has worked to spur on other disabled athletes to train alongside him. He said the Palestinian Paralympic Committee had grown to oversee dozens of clubs to develop athletes, including in basketball, goalball and swimming.
Despite the massive destruction of sports infrastructure, Aldeeb believes sport will only become more important as a means of survival for Palestinians. “We are freed in Gaza by sport,” he said. “It’s one of the only ways for us to survive, and so we make it happen.”
