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National Team Member Becomes at Least 265th Palestinian Footballer Killed by Israel in Gaza
Muhannad al-Lili's killing by Israeli airstrike came as the world mourned the death of Portugal and Liverpool star Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva in a car crash in Spain.
Jul 04, 2025
Muhannad Fadl al-Lili, captain of the Al-Maghazi Services Club and a member of Palestine's national football team, died Thursday from injuries suffered during an Israeli airstrike on his family home in the central Gaza Strip earlier this week, making him the latest of hundreds of Palestinian athletes killed since the start of Israel's genocidal onslaught.
Al-Maghazi Services Club announced al-Lili's death in a Facebook tribute offering condolences to "his family, relatives, friends, and colleagues" and asking "Allah to shower him with his mercy."
The Palestine Football Association (PFA) said that "on Monday, a drone fired a missile at Muhannad's room on the third floor of his house, which led to severe bleeding in the skull."
"During the war of extermination against our people, Muhannad tried to travel outside Gaza to catch up with his wife, who left the strip for Norway on a work mission before the outbreak of the war," the association added. "But he failed to do so, and was deprived of seeing his eldest son, who was born outside the Gaza Strip."
According to the PFA, al-Lili is at least the 265th Palestinian footballer and 585th athlete to be killed by Israeli forces since they launched their assault and siege on Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Sports journalist Leyla Hamed says 439 Palestinian footballers have been killed by Israel.
Overall, Israel's war—which is the subject of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case—has left more than 206,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, and around 2 million more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to Gaza officials.
The Palestine Chronicle contrasted the worldwide press coverage of the car crash deaths of Portuguese footballer Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva with the media's relative silence following al-Lili's killing.
"Jota's death was a tragedy that touched millions," the outlet wrote. "Yet the death of Muhannad al-Lili... was met with near-total silence from global sports media."
Last week, a group of legal experts including two United Nations special rapporteurs appealed to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the world football governing body, demanding that its Governance Audit and Compliance Committee take action against the Israel Football Association for violating FIFA rules by playing matches on occupied Palestinian territory.
In July 2024, the ICJ found that Israel's then-57-year occupation of Palestine—including Gaza—is an illegal form of apartheid that should be ended as soon as possible.
During their invasion and occupation of Gaza, Israeli forces have also used sporting facilities including Yarmouk Stadium for the detention of Palestinian men, women, and children—many of whom have reported torture and other abuse at the hands of their captors.
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FIFA Can No Longer Be Silent on Israel's Human Rights Atrocities in Gaza
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Jun 26, 2025
Although you might not know it from reading mainstream media in the U.S., Gaza continues to be under siege. Israel has installed a blockade of humanitarian aid, weaponizing food for everyday Gazans who desperately need it, while the Gaza Humanitarian Organization—a shadowy, Israeli-backed organization that relies on private US security contractors—continues to slow-roll the delivery of food. Securing basic foodstuffs has become akin to “a perverted Squid Games” where all too often death is the outcome, according to Dr. Mark Braunner, a volunteer at Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
With U.S. media attention swiveling away from Gaza and toward Iran, this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Enter a gaggle of leading legal experts and scholars who this week ramped up pressure on FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, demanding that its Governance Audit and Compliance Committee address a well-documented complaint against Israel for holding matches in settlements inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
FIFA has long demonstrated a conspicuous deference toward Israel. FIFA has consistently looked the other way when it comes to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, even when doing so means ignoring its own stated commitments to human rights.
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Let’s be absolutely clear: Israel is carrying out human-rights atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, bombing hospitals, killing Palestinians as they attempt to collect aid, barring doctors from entering Gaza, green-lighting the most aggressive expansion of West Bank settlements in decades. It’s no wonder that Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently characterized Israeli actions as “war crimes.”
On the football front, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has staged matches in occupied Palestinian territory. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian players and coaches while engaging in the systematic destruction of sport facilities, even converting Gaza’s storied Yarmouk stadium into a temporary interrogation site. These actions violate numerous FIFA Statutes.
FIFA’s response? One might say crickets, but crickets actually make noise. For more than a decade it has foot-dragged investigating good-faith claims against Israel. As Fair Square, the London-based rights group, asserted, “FIFA’s ongoing failure to enforce sanctions against the Israeli Football Association despite long-standing and irrefutable evidence that the IFA is in violation of FIFA Statutes is further evidence of the organisation’s ad hoc and selective enforcement of its rules.”
FIFA’s inaction is a grim example of what Henry Giroux calls “The violence of organized forgetting.”
FIFA’s free pass for Israel is deeply hypocritical. In February 2022, only a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, both FIFA and UEFA, Europe’s governing body for soccer, moved swiftly to suspend Russian football clubs and national teams from all competition. In a joint statement, FIFA and UEFA insisted that “Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.” And yet, no such solidarity has been forthcoming for Palestinians.
The main reason FIFA and UEFA stood up in the face of Ukraine’s invasion was that numerous European countries refused to take the field against Russia in World Cup qualifying matches. Leaders from places Poland, Sweden, England and the Czech Republic insisted that the powerbrokers of soccer take principled action, forcing FIFA and UEFA’s hand. The president of France’s football association stated, “The world of sport, and in particular football, cannot remain neutral.”
This brings us back to Israel. It’s not too late for soccer barons to take action. And it turns out that UEFA is actually a key player. The Israeli Football Association was originally part of the Asian Football Confederation, given its geographical location in the Middle East. But after Indonesia, Sudan, and Turkey all refused to play 1958 World Cup qualifying matches against Israel, and other countries applied political pressure, the IFA was eventually expelled in 1974. This placed Israel in the soccer wilderness until, in the early 1990s, UEFA invited the Israeli national team to participate in its competitions. In 1994, Israel became a full member of UEFA.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, UEFA halted all matches in Israel for the foreseeable future. This meant that Israel was forced to play recent World Cup qualifying “home” matches in Hungary.
Rights groups—from Human Rights Watch to Fair Square to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner—insist that Israel has openly violated FIFA Statutes. Therefore, individual Football Associations from around the world need to stand up and press FIFA to follow its own rules.
Norwegian Football Federation President Lise Klaveness moved in the right direction recently when she stated, “None of us can remain indifferent to the disproportionate attacks that Israel has subjected the civilian population in Gaza to.” When Susan Shalabi, the vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, urged FIFA to take action against Israel at its recent meetings in Paraguay, the Norwegian Football Federation issued a statement that it “stands in solidarity with the Palestinian Football Association and supports their right to have this long-standing issue properly addressed by FIFA.” We need more of this sort of political courage.
Sport should not be allowed to supersede human rights. For too long, FIFA has executed behind-the-scenes maneuverings that have allowed it to avoid reckoning with Israel’s human-rights violations. As FIFA whistleblower Bonita Mersiades put it, “True reform demands more than new systems—it requires new values.” At the very least, football honchos and fans alike must align their stated values with principled actions.
With authoritarianism on the march globally, now is the time to fix the limit on human-rights abuses, using sports as a way to immobilize the jackboots. As Nelson Mandela put it, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
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Saudi Arabia Deserves a Red Card, Not the World Cup
Awarding Saudi Arabia the World Cup violates FIFA’s own human rights rules. The world of football should not look away.
Dec 22, 2024
No one can predict which team will win the Men’s World Cup soccer championship in 2034. But based on current conditions, we know the biggest losers will be the millions of migrant workers subject to egregious abuses while building stadiums, transit, infrastructure, and other facilities for host country Saudi Arabia over the next decade.
On December 11, the 211 national members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) will hold a vote in an “Extraordinary Congress” to decide who will host the 2034 tournament. The conclusion is already known because Saudi Arabia is the only bidder and has received a glowing score from FIFA in the evaluation of its bid.
FIFA doesn’t disclose how much it profits from granting its flagship tournament to countries with dismal human rights records. Those most affected by this decision— Saudi Arabia’s 13.4 million migrant workers, Saudi citizens, players, fans and journalists—have no vote.
FIFA and its Saudi government partners boasted recently that Saudi Arabia’s evaluation score of 419.8 out of 500 is “the highest ever score in FIFA World Cup history.” The deeply flawed FIFA evaluation process further downplayed systemic human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia with a “medium risk” rating.
FIFA gave this “highest ever score” to a country with no labor unions, no press freedom, and a government that is deeply repressive and punishes any dissent.
“We cannot say that Saudi Arabia is a ‘medium risk’ country, given that it has become a pure police state,” said Lina al-Hathloul, Head of Monitoring and Advocacy at ALQST For Human Rights, whose sister Loujain was jailed and tortured for advocating for women’s right to drive.
This month FIFA leaders also rejected the organization’s own independent report that confirms FIFA “has a responsibility” to compensate families of thousands of migrant workers who died building FIFA’s last World Cup, in Qatar in 2022.
Like Qatar, Saudi Arabia operates under the abusive labor sponsorship system known as kafala, where migrant workers pay large recruitment fees, often have passports taken and wages stolen by employers, and cannot change jobs or leave the country freely. Labor unions, strikes and protests are banned. Saudi authorities do not adequately protect migrant workers from dangerous conditions such as extreme heat.
The unprecedented scale of Saudi World Cup plans makes the potential for labor rights catastrophes greater even than for the Qatar World Cup. The Saudi hosting documents promise to construct—in the deadly desert heat, as in Qatar—11 new and 4 refurbished stadiums,185,000 new hotel rooms, and to carry out airport, road and rail construction. This infrastructure deficit will rest entirely on the backs of migrant workers to build. Many of these World Cup projects will be accomplished with funding from the Saudi state-run $925 billion Public Investment Fund and from oil and gas behemoth Aramco, FIFA’s new major worldwide partner.
The hundreds of billions of dollars in construction come with a high human cost. A new Human Rights Watch report found that 884 migrant workers from Bangladesh died in Saudi Arabia between January and July 2024—a six month period. Eighty percent of these deaths were un-investigated, attributed to “natural causes,” and not eligible for compensation. Human Rights Watch wrote to FIFA President Gianni Infantino on November 4, 2024, documenting widespread labor abuses on giga-projects in Saudi Arabia that will be part of the World Cup infrastructure. FIFA has not responded.
Winning the right to host is an effort championed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has made clear that the FIFA World Cup is a centerpiece of the Saudi national sportswashing strategy to project a reformist image of the country, while covering up its human rights abuses. “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1 percent, then we will continue doing sportswashing,” the de-facto Saudi leader said in an interview with Fox News last year. “I don’t care.”
But FIFA should care. Awarding Saudi Arabia the World Cup violates FIFA’s own human rights rules. In 2016, facing a corruption crisis, FIFA put in place specific human rights standards for itself and countries hosting the games—including protections against forced labor. These reforms were supposed to keep the tournament away from the worst human-rights violators. FIFA also pledged “an ongoing due diligence process to identify, address, evaluate and communicate the risks of involvement with adverse human rights impacts,” promising to “make every effort to uphold its international human rights responsibilities.”
Yet not a single migrant worker, victim of human rights crimes, torture survivor, jailed women’s rights defender, or Saudi civil society member was consulted for FIFA’s supposedly independent human rights assessment. FIFA’s “Bid Evaluation Report” doesn’t even mention the historic forced labor complaint against the Saudi government filed by the trade union BWI at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in June of this year. A similar complaint about Qatar in 2014 spurred labor reforms in the country, although too late to help thousands of migrant workers who died.
In 2023, FIFA was forced to cancel the sponsorship it sold to the Saudi state-run tourism company “Visit Saudi,” after protests by women players. In October, more than 100 top women players published an open letter protesting FIFA’s lucrative sponsorship deal with the Saudi state oil giant Aramco. Already, two United States senators have called for FIFA to pick a different host for the 2034 World Cup.
FIFA needs to cancel the vote and back athletes and human rights over profiteering from Saudi sportswashing. Every sponsor, business, broadcaster, and national team associated with the Saudi World Cup will be tainted by widespread labor and other abuses unless wholesale, urgent human rights reforms are implemented. FIFA’s decision to award Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup is an unforgivable betrayal of basic human rights that risks migrant workers’ lives. It deserves a red card.
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