THE 2026 Fifa Men’s World Cup is about to begin but Palestine is not among the 48 countries in the draw. The Palestinian men’s national football team has never qualified, although remarkably, the team reached the third round of the 2026 Asian Football Confederation qualifiers, despite Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank.

Today, with Palestinians still under siege, whether from Israeli bombs or the genocidal deprivation of food, clean water and medical supplies, World Cup dreams are more elusive than ever for Palestine’s surviving players.

Most of the athletes preparing for their opening World Cup matches in the United States, Canada and Mexico, beginning this Thursday, enjoy celebrity status at home. But many Palestinian footballers and their fellow athletes are not only in perpetual danger of death and starvation along with the rest of the population of Gaza, but have also been deliberately targeted by the Israeli military.

More than 800 Palestinian athletes have been killed since October 2023, at least 400 of them football players. The most famous among them was Suleiman al-Obeid, a star national team player known as the “Palestinian Pele.” He was murdered last August along with others, targeted as they desperately waited to secure food for their families.

Then, last week, four Palestinian women students from Birzeit University were abducted by Israeli forces during pre-dawn raids in the illegally occupied West Bank. One was Natalie Abu Dayyeh, 21, a former player for the Palestinian women’s national football team. Another of the four is Sama Safi, a US citizen.

Rand al-Halawani, a 20-year-old member of the current Palestinian national women’s football team, was also arrested and detained last week after being summoned to the Talpiot police station in West Jerusalem for questioning.

Dima Yousef, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Football Association, has condemned the arrest of its players, calling the detentions part of a pattern of “systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes which continues without accountability,” and “a clear violation of Fifa regulations and the principles that guarantee the protection of athletes.”

Fifa officials, meanwhile, have said nothing at all, despite calls from the PFA to intervene. “The continued silence and inaction of the international football community… enables these illegal practices to continue with impunity,” the PFA said.

Fifa’s inaction comes as no surprise, given its president, Gianni Infantino, is a craven defender of Israel and a close friend of the genocide-enabling US president, Donald Trump. Infantino bestowed the absurd Fifa Peace Prize on Trump during the Fifa World Cup draw last December, the first time the prize had been given and an accolade that appeared to have been created specifically to curry favour with the US president.

Infantino has also spoken out against any sporting boycott of Israel, including proposing a new statute that would “never ban any country from playing football because of the acts of their political leaders.”

US senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat and outspoken critic of the current Israeli government, has called for the release of Sami. “Israeli security forces came to her home at 3am in the morning and just took her without explanation. She told them she was an American citizen. They didn’t care,” Van Hollen said. He has urged Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, to secure her release.

“I am really sick and tired of the Israeli government — the Netanyahu government — taking American taxpayer dollars and then mistreating Americans,” Van Hollen said.

Fears for the safety of all of the women in Israeli custody is extreme given Israel’s track record. The four students were transferred to Israel’s Ofer Prison, notorious for its extreme overcrowding and physical abuse of inmates. Human rights groups have campaigned for decades to draw attention to the barbaric conditions for Palestinians in Israeli detention centres. But it took the publicly displayed brutalisation of members of the most recent Freedom Flotilla, after they were captured by Israeli forces, to elicit public condemnation from other countries.

Despite the beatings, rape and torture endured by the captured Flotilla activists —and applauded by the sadistic Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security — all of them took pains to remind the world that the treatment they endured was nowhere near as severe as the extreme cruelty meted out to Palestinian prisoners.

The facilities where Palestinian prisoners are held have been described as a “network of torture camps” by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem and others. Beatings, starvation, torture, sleep deprivation and sexual violence are routine. Palestinian prisoner advocacy groups say more than 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.

Both of the football players arrested, along with the other students, have reportedly had limited access to lawyers. Detainees are typically deprived of any contact with family members. There is also a risk that rather than release the women, they could be moved to one of Israel’s notorious black site prison facilities. The UN has documented systematic sexual violence against Palestinian women held by Israeli forces, including rapes, at these facilities.

Israeli authorities have been vague about the grounds for the women’s arrests, citing suspicion of “promoting terrorist activities,” in relation to the four students, including Abu Dayyeh. Al-Halawani has been accused of “throwing objects” during a demonstration in Jerusalem.

On Saturday, Bishop Imad Haddad of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, of which Abu Dayyeh is a member, put out a statement saying the entire community was “deeply shocked and horrified by this news, as well as by the news that her family does not yet know where [Abu Dayyeh] has been taken.”

Bisho Haddad reiterated fears that Abu Dayyeh would disappear like the “thousands of Palestinians in Israeli detention without charge or trial.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland, and the author of No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.