War gives Palestinian Olympians a new role: Athlete-diplomats

Paris: Taliyah Brooks gingerly approached the athlete as he lay on the grass and asked her question in a voice just louder than a whisper.

"Do you have a pin?" she began, squeezing her shoulders together in a nervous shrug and offering a slight smile. She needn't have worried.

The athlete, who had been stretching, shot up immediately and flashed a huge grin. Pins are the currency of friendship at the Olympic Games, and for Mohammed Dwedar, who will run for the Palestinian team in the track and field competition, this intrusion was more than welcome.

"I was almost nervous to come over," Brooks, a Texan, said, "because I don't know how y'all feel about the United States."

Brooks was lucky. Dwedar, who had traveled to Paris from his home in Jericho, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was almost out of pins. So were most of his teammates.

The war in the Gaza Strip has given the eight Palestinians competing in Paris a higher profile than usual at the Olympics. They, along with the Israeli team, are experiencing the Paris Games this year very differently. While Israelis experienced a surge in international sympathy after the Hamas-led atrocities last October, they have faced increasing hostility ever since for the ferocious way in which the Israeli military has retaliated in Gaza.

At the Olympics, that has forced Israelis to compete under a suffocating blanket of armed security. The Palestinian athletes, by contrast, have become minor celebrities, fielding requests for photographs, hugs and pins wherever they go.

Those interactions are part of a dual role the Palestinian team has in Paris, said Layla Almasri, who like Dwedar is a runner competing in the 800 meters.

"We are here to compete, but we are diplomats here as well," Almasri said. "It's definitely something different to juggle."

Almasri is part of a contingent drawn not only from the West Bank but also from the Palestinian diaspora. Almasri, for example, was born and raised in the United States to parents from Nablus, another West Bank city, and started competing for the Palestinian team only last year. Valerie Tarazi, a swimmer who carried the Palestinian flag at the opening ceremony, is from the Chicago area but said her family was one of the oldest Palestinian Christian families and could trace its history in Gaza to the year 400.

Such is the interest in the Palestinians' stories that the biggest draw for journalists at the swimming pool on Sunday morning was a swimmer, Yazan Al Bawwab, who failed to make it through the heats in the 100-meter backstroke.

Those kinds of encounters, and chance ones in the athletes' village, have allowed members of the Palestinian team to share their experiences and answer questions about how life, and sports, function in the West Bank and Gaza.

Dwedar said that driving to a nearby Palestinian city for an athletic competition often required a grueling, hourslong journey through Israeli military checkpoints. Those trips are now effectively impossible because Israeli raids in the West Bank have escalated drastically since the start of the war.

Wasim Abusal, a 20-year-old featherweight from the West Bank who is competing in boxing's 57-kilogram (126-pound) weight class, said that he was unable to find training partners at his own weight so sparred instead with a fighter who competed at 71 kilograms, about 30 pounds heavier. "I have to reduce my speed, and he has to reduce his strength," Abusal said. "Otherwise it can't work."

No athletes from Gaza were able to join the Olympic team in France this year. Mohammed Hamada, who at the Tokyo Olympics became the first Palestinian to compete in weightlifting, lost his place after losing 20 kilograms, or 44 pounds, while trapped in Gaza.

Tamer Qaoud, a 20-year-old middle-distance runner, returned home from a meet in China only two days before the war and spent most of the next nine months seeking safety and food for his family. Qaoud lost his coach in a strike in southern Gaza, and he said he feared that even a short jog could unwittingly lead him into the path of Israeli bombs or soldiers.

So last week, rather than raising the flag in Paris alongside Dwedar and Almasri, Qaoud watched the opening ceremony from a crowded tent in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, where he now lives with his displaced parents and siblings. "I'm proud to see them there," he said. "But it's painful given how much I wish I could be there, too."

The Palestinian athletes have dressed to be seen. The kaffiyeh, a type of scarf that has long been a symbol of their struggle for independence, is tied to their practice bags. Tarazi painted the middle fingers of her nails in the colors of the flag. Abusal competed with the Palestinian flag on his top. Al Bawwab had one temporarily tattooed to his chest before swimming in the Olympic pool.

The Palestinian team is living at one end of the Olympic Village, opposite from the tightly guarded one housing Israel's athletes. But that has not stopped the athletes from crossing paths in common areas. For some Palestinians, that can be difficult. "I feel grief and anger at the same time," Dwedar said.

The war in Gaza has claimed more than 30,000 Palestinian lives since Oct. 7, according to health officials in the embattled enclave, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Some of the war's casualties were athletes and coaches, killed in airstrikes or by the desperate conditions in Gaza.

Tarazi recalled returning from an overseas meet to hear that a fellow athlete, a beach volleyball player, had been killed in a bombing. In June came the news that Majed Abu Maraheel, who in 1996 became his homeland's first Olympic flag-bearer, had died in Gaza because of a lack of treatment for kidney failure, his wife, Nihad Abu Maraheel, said.

The persistent news of deaths weighs heavily on the Palestinian athletes in Paris, they said.

But the emotion attached to the Palestinians extends beyond their team.

On Sunday afternoon, Abusal found himself supported by a raucous crowd at the boxing venue when he lined up for his first bout in the preliminaries. He came out to cheers and was backed with chants of "Wasim" and "Palestine" throughout his fight. His Swedish opponent, Nebil Ibrahim, won comfortably but said he felt heartbroken.

"At first, I was very sad that I got the Palestinian, because I am a very strong Palestinian supporter, and it breaks my heart that I have to eliminate him from his dream," Ibrahim said. "But I tried to turn it around and say it is an honor for me to fight the first Palestinian boxer, to share a ring with him."

Back at track practice, Brooks, the American heptathlete, placed her Palestinian pin above one of the Eiffel Tower on the lanyard attached to her Olympic credential and then posed for a photo before embracing Dwedar and his coach.

"I'm glad y'all are here," she told him, "and thanks for talking with me."