Israel postpones demolition of Palestinian children’s football pitch

Israel has postponed the demolition of a Palestinian children’s football club in the city of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank.

It said the Aida Youth Centre’s pitch was constructed without the necessary permits.

It said the demolition was necessary for security reasons.

An international campaign to save it, including a petition with more than half a million signatures, appears to have forced the authorities to reconsider. The club, however, said it had not yet received any official notification.

It is barely a 10th of the size of a full-scale football field, there are patches of rust on the goalposts and, towering over the length of one of the touchlines, the architecture of conflict looms large in Israel’s concrete security barrier.

But while it may not rank high up among the world’s iconic sporting venues, this children’s football club has found itself at the centre of a hard-fought international campaign for its survival.

And despite the asymmetrical odds as it took on the Israeli state, that campaign appears – for now at least – to have worked.

The club has won a reprieve against the threat of demolition by the Israeli military, which claimed that the pitch was far too close to the barrier.

On the very northern edge of Bethlehem, construction of the pitch began in 2020 with the aim of providing a place to practise football for more than 200 young players from the nearby Aida refugee camp.

The cramped and crowded streets contain the homes of the descendants of Palestinian families who were forced or who fled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

On 3 November last year, as the children made their short walk from the camp for that day’s training, they found a notice pinned to the gate of the football field declaring it to be illegal.

The notice was followed by a demolition order, issued at the end of December.

“We don’t have anywhere else to play, 10-year-old Naya told me, wearing a Brazil shirt with the name of the footballing legend Neymar emblazoned on the back.

“We are building our dreams here,” she said. “If they demolish our field, they will demolish our dreams.”

I asked another young player, Mohammed, what his reaction was when he heard the news that the club was earmarked for destruction.

“I was upset,” he told me. “This is a field I really care for.”

The community fought back, posting videos on social media, launching a petition attracting hundreds of thousands of signatures as well as the reported interventions of senior officials from some of football’s global and regional governing bodies.

In its latest statement, the Israeli military repeated its claim that the football pitch, built so close to the wall, posed a security issue.

But the BBC understands that a political decision has been made to postpone the demolition order “for the time being”.

Israel began building its concrete barrier in the early 2000s in the face of a wave of deadly suicide bombings and other attacks carried out by Palestinians which killed hundreds of Israelis.

It says it is vital for Israel’s protection and that it has dramatically cut the number of attacks.

Palestinians, however, say that it has become a tool of collective punishment, separating them from their workplaces, dividing their communities and effectively annexing parts of their land.

For them, the fight over the football pitch highlights a wider injustice.

While they are being denied the right to keep a small sporting facility on the boundary of one of their cities, Israel is approving vast new settlements across the occupied West Bank and which are considered illegal under international law.

The immediate threat may now have been averted for the football pitch.

But the club is taking nothing for granted.

Mohammad Abu Srour, one of the board members of the Aida Youth Centre, told me that they feared that the threat might come back when the club is out of the spotlight.

“We’re going to continue to campaign,” he told me.