GAZA, March 31, 2025 - He sat on a heap of rubble, as if the weight of everything he’d lost had dropped him from the sky. "I lost a three-story house," he kept repeating. "I worked over thirty years to build it. I finally became independent of my family, and the house was bombed to the ground."
This is Saeb Jundiya, former captain of the Palestinian national football team. He was staring at the ruins of his home, sifting through the debris of a life once full. After a year and three months of displacement, the ceasefire allowed him to return and recover one surviving memento: a torn national team jersey buried beneath stone and ash.
Jundiya lived in Shuja'iyya, on the eastern edge of Gaza City, near the border. It was a neighbourhood flattened in Israel’s relentless war on the Gaza Strip.
INDISCRIMINATE WAR STARTED "On October 7, 2023, the bombing started. Non-stop," he recalled. “Shells hit while I was still inside. Smoke filled the house. My mother and family fled to my grandfather's home near Palestine Stadium in the west. I stayed behind until 10 a.m. to monitor the house and our belongings, but it became unbearable. People were dying all around us. I had to leave. My brothers and I went to Al-Shifa Hospital to check on injured relatives. After a brief stay at my grandfather’s, we had no choice but to flee south."
COACHING CAREER As a member of the Palestinian Football Association’s selection committee for the southern governorates, Jundiya was coaching Olympic, youth, and junior squads. Just before the war, he helped organize a major championship across Gaza to scout talent born in 2008. He had recently signed with Al-Hilal Club of Gaza, just three days before the war. He never got to play a match.
Now, as he wandered the skeletal remains of his home, he cried. His voice broke not just for the structure lost, but for the memories crushed beneath it.
CRUSHED DREAMS “Nothing can replace what I had. I built a mini sports museum in my house - medals, trophies, a bronze from the Arab tournament with the national team, and another from the 2012 Asian Beach Games in China. All gone. I managed to salvage only two team jerseys I wore in international matches. The second floor was mine. The third belonged to my children.”
When the leaflets rained down urging civilians to evacuate, the message was brutal: leave or die. With no time to think, the family left. Through friends and connections, including Moaz Abu Salim, son of the late Vice President of the Football Association, they found shelter at Deir al-Balah Union Club.
"THE JOURNEY WAS HELLISH": “We walked six kilometres from Palestine Stadium to Kuwait Roundabout under drones, through bomb smoke. Vehicles weren’t moving. Warplanes filled the sky. Along the way, cars carrying civilians were bombed. There were martyrs on the roadside left and right.”
They were rerouted through the Zeitoun neighbourhood after passing the Netzarim checkpoint. Each step was a goodbye to Gaza City, to his life.
"I left everything - medals, club shirts, documents, even my ID. The occupation destroyed it all. There was no going back."
At the Deir al-Balah Club, Jundiya became a displaced person, not a coach. The football pitch where he once made history now served as a shelter.
“I never imagined stadiums would become refugee camps,” he said. “That green field held the story of my life.”
LIFE OF DISPLACEMENT Now, he wakes up early just to find water, firewood, and food. Football has been replaced by foraging. He helps the club organize activities for displaced children, hoping to lift some of the psychological weight they carry. But for Jundiya, the pain is relentless.
“I used to cope by focusing on sports through all the previous aggressions. But this war, a war of extermination, has made that impossible. Survival comes first. We’ve been pushed back hundreds of years. Life is on pause. Our teammates are martyrs. Our family members are gone. Schools, clubs, and institutions, were all erased. A whole generation stands in water lines and soup kitchens, waiting for a future that’s vanished.”
WORRIED MOST ABOUT HIS CHILDREN “My son is in high school. Before, he had everything - power, internet, tutoring. Now, we walk miles to charge a phone. There's no internet, no healthy food, no safety. Everything is expensive or unavailable. It’s winter. Final exams are near. And we're paralyzed.”
The hardest moment came with his cousin’s final plea: “Don’t let me die.”
"DON'T LET ME DIE" Fawaz Jundiya, once a footballer and coach, had undergone a kidney transplant. His wife was the donor. During the war, medication ran out. Rafah crossing was sealed. Jundiya took him daily to the hospital, helplessly watching his cousin slip away.
“There was nothing I could do. I gave him emotional support, and stayed by his side. But that wasn’t enough. He died in pain, stripped of his basic right to survive.”
By: Nelly Al-Masri, Sports Journalist, Gaza
Translation by: Issam Khalidi
