Gaza Sunbirds, the cycling team of amputees who compete for ‘Palestine’s right to exist’

United Kingdom’s Jake Stewart won the last stage of France’s Four Days of Dunkirk on May 18 with the Israel-Premier Tech team, whose participation in the most recent Vuelta a España had provoked sizable protests. The day after that victory, the country Stewart had been representing killed a different cyclist, Ahmed al-Dali, in a Gaza bombing. In fact, Israel ended the life of the 33-year-old Palestinian in two stages. The first was in 2014, when one of the country’s bombs left him so gravely wounded he was presumed dead and taken to the morgue, where he later woke up. His leg had to be amputated. The second stage, on May 19, came when yet another Israeli missile ended al-Dali’s life while he tried to help those who had been wounded in a preceding attack. He had been one of the members of the Gaza Sunbirds cycling team.

Like al-Dali, each of his teammates, who now number 16, have a single leg. Israel left them mutilated in previous offensives in Gaza, via bombings or sniper fire. At the dawn of the current invasion, in which Israel has killed more than 68,000 people, Israeli planes destroyed the warehouse containing most of the team’s bicycles in a November 2023 attack. Those that had been stored elsewhere have been rendered unusable after the destruction of Gaza’s roads, explains Karim Ali from London. The 26-year-old Palestinian, who now forms part of country’s diaspora, is the director and co-founder of the Sunbirds, which was founded in 2020. All of his athletes, he emphasizes via video call, have “a history of struggle” behind them.

Two of them, including co-founder Alaa al-Dali — cousin of the deceased al-Dali — and Mohamed Asfour were evacuated in April 2024 to Egypt and later, to Belgium. The two cyclists now compete with Team Palestine, the first professional Palestinian team that has been able to participate in international races like the World Cup of Para-cycling in Ostende, Belgium and Maniago, Italy in May, and the Asian Para Cycling Championships. Their goal is to qualify for the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.

But being able to represent the Palestinian flag in international competitions goes beyond athletics for these cyclists, according to the team’s director: it is a political act. “Athletics are one of the many global arenas where power is being challenged,” Ali says, referencing the Israeli occupation. The presence of the Gaza Sunbirds in these competitions, he says, is “a way of reminding the world” of Palestine’s right “to exist” and “be recognized.” Israel, which denies Palestinians the right to an independent state, is “horrified” by this, he says. The president of the Palestinian Olympic committee, Jibril Rajoub, reported in September that the Israeli army has killed more than 1,000 athletes in two years of attacks on Gaza.

Gunshots

In March 2018, Alaa al-Dali took a bullet from an Israeli sniper in the Great March of Return in Gaza. He was 21 years old and had been riding his bicycle at the time.

During the protests, which demanded the end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip that was imposed by Israel in 2007, the number of amputees “increased significantly due to the deliberate targeting of protesters’ limbs by Israeli snipers,” states a paper by the Institute for Palestine Studies. “Can I get another knee this afternoon?,” asked an Israeli soldier of his superior by radio, according to an article published in 2020 by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Al-Dali is one of nearly 10,000 Palestinians who were wounded in those protests. He is also one of the more than 150 people who lost limbs due to Israeli bullets. The shots that led to the amputation of his right leg at the thigh also crushed his dream of representing Palestine in the Asian Games in Indonesia.

That same year, the millionaire Sylvain Adams, who owns the Israel-Premier Tech team, arranged for the 2018 Giro d’Italia to begin in his country, in exchange for paying the organization nearly $14 million, according to several publications.

Two months after his amputation, Alaa al-Dali learned to ride a bicycle with one leg and, in 2020, he founded the Gaza Sunbirds with Ali. His goal was to give a chance to the Strip’s amputees to exercise their right to athletics. Also, to give them back a sense of dignity, of which their wounds had robbed them, and their freedom. On their bikes, says Ali, they can travel the Strip without the limitations that crutches impose, can once again “pick up their kids from school or visit their mother” without depending on help from others.

The beginnings of the team were modest. Its members lacked nearly everything and even had “to tie their feet to the pedals with tape,” recalls Ali, in the absence of proper equipment. Ahmed al-Dali, the cyclist killed by Israel in May, trained in blue jeans. He couldn’t allow himself the luxury of buying athletic wear.

Since those days, the team has been on “a long journey,” explains Ali. The Gaza Sunbirds now have an ample donor and volunteer network in a variety of countries, who contribute to funding the team and who provide the athletes in Gaza with a basic salary. In October 2023, what had been an “athletic” team became a “humanitarian organization,” its coordinator of humanitarian aid, Akram Ajour, says via video call from Gaza.

In the two years of the Israeli offensive, the team has distributed more than $400,000 worth of groceries, hot meals, and housing materials to the Gazan population, according to its website.

Amputee children

Mohamed Asfour was 19 years old in 2018, when an Israeli sniper got him during the Great March of Return. From Belgium, where he now lives, he recalls how he spent 18 days waiting for Israeli permission that never arrived for a medical evacuation to another country that, perhaps, could have saved his leg. Instead, the wound became infected and doctors had to amputate.

“My life took a million-degree turn. I went from being an active young person to needing help to walk and go to the bathroom,” he remembers. Asfour fell into depression and his weight dropped to around 90 pounds. But meeting Alaa al-Dali helped him to see “the other side of life”, he says.

From London, the director of the Gaza Sunbirds says the young athlete is no longer just “that wounded adolescent who at 19 years old didn’t know what he was going to do with his life.” Now, he’s become “the number 17 cyclist in the world in his Paralympic category,” who travels “carrying the name of Palestine” — it appears on his maillot — and who is trying to be “a role model for people with disabilities.”

Gaza is going to need him because an entire “generation of Gazan children are going to grow up without limbs,” Ali continues. UNICEF calculates that between 3,000 and 4,000 children have undergone amputations of one or more arms or legs due to Israeli attacks on the Strip. Stories like that of Asfour may convince them, says Ali, that “there is a still a future for them.”

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