Mustafa Tafesh was born to be an athlete. As a 21-year-old infielder for Palestine National Baseball Team, he made history in the first baseball championship Palestine competed in—the 2023 West Asia Cup in Pakistan—securing second place. But his dream was not to win; it was to raise Palestine’s flag internationally as an athlete. “When we played together, he was happy to represent Palestine at the highest level,” said Nader Ihmoud, an infielder for the team and editor in chief of Palestine in America.

Mustafa spent his childhood in various sports, playing soccer and badminton at the Hilal al Quds soccer club as a midfielder and defender and winning the Palestinian Under 18 League Badminton Championship in 2018. In each sport he played, he aspired to play at the international level. Completing his education at the age of 16, he started to compete in local tournaments and refereed girls’ softball and baseball matches. Even at times where the baseball team lost, he found a way to say the right one-liners to lift his team’s spirits while wearing a smile on his face. “He was the best teammate you can imagine,” said Ihmoud. “He was always in a good mood and he put everybody else in a good mood.”

On August 12, Tafesh was killed by an Israeli air strike outside his home in Sheikh Radwan, one of more than 800 Palestinian athletes who have died amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. “The occupation killed him,” said Ahmed Tafesh, Mustafa’s father and the president of the Palestinian Federation of Baseball and Softball, “preventing him from achieving his dreams and depriving Palestine of a distinguished player.”

The Palestine National Baseball team was formed after Mahmoud Tafesh, Mustafa’s uncle, was on a trip to Egypt, where a friend introduced him to baseball. As he returned to Gaza, he began to learn more about the game through YouTube, spending a month watching American teams play. His dream was to build a culture of Palestinian baseball by supporting the first generation of Palestinian players. Despite not having professional equipment—like bats or gloves—children, teens, and adults played the sport with sticks and their bare hands on open fields.

The sport grew in Palestine, especially in Gaza, where Mahmoud recruited 50 athletes. Through social media, the team quickly caught international interest, most notably by the World Baseball Softball Confederation who requested that the team officially join. In a 2019 trip to Japan, Mahmoud attended the World Baseball Softball Confederation Congress where the Palestine Baseball and Softball Federation formed, now ranked 38th in the world and ninth in Asia.

Soon after, Palestinians in the diaspora also joined—many from Chicago, home to the largest Palestinian diaspora community in America. After preparing for their first international tournament, athletes traveled to Islamabad at the 2023 West Asia Cup. The athletes were based all over the world, but their desire to represent Palestine is what brought them together. Though traveling from Chicago to Islamabad took just 24 hours for the athletes in the diaspora, the journey from Gaza to Islamabad went on for a week due to the various checkpoints, permits, and restrictions placed on travel and movement by Israel.

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“I was gonna have my Palestinian brothers from Gaza there, and that meant the world to me,” said Zaki Haj, the team’s 23-year-old pitcher from Chicago. “I always promised them on the phone, ‘Hey, when I meet with you guys, I’m gonna practice throwing mechanics with you. I’m gonna teach you how to throw a baseball.’ They always had the desire, and they still do have the desire with going through a war, of wanting to learn the game,” he said.

The team clicked immediately, speaking to each other in the same Palestinian dialect of Arabic and doing dabke, a traditional dance from Bilad al-Sham. “When I met these guys, it felt as if I had known them my whole life,” said Tariq Suboh, the team’s catcher, who has also hit the most home runs in Palestinian baseball history. “It felt like I was talking to one of my little cousins, specifically Mustafa. He really had great energy, a great smile, he was a guy that you like to be around.”

During their time in Islamabad, the Palestinian American athletes would ask their teammates from Gaza if they would ever come to America. “They would say they want to visit America, but they never wanted to live in America. They love, love, love where they’re from. They would never leave where they’re from,” Haj said.

As the team bonded, they also grew closer to their supporters, finding overwhelming solidarity in Pakistan as locals cheered “Falasteen Zindabad,” which in Urdu translates to “long live Palestine.” The team competed against several countries, including India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh—eventually losing to Pakistan and earning second place in the West Asia Cup.

But the cup was the last time the team played as a whole. As the team entered various international tournaments—including the Asian Baseball Championship in Taiwan and the 2024 Arab Classic in Dubai—team members from Gaza couldn’t play internationally, as Israel’s starvation of Gaza made it nearly impossible for athletes to continue training while struggling to survive. More than 280 athletic and sports facilities had also been destroyed.

What kept the team going was knowing that their teammates in Gaza were cheering them on. While the team lost during the semifinals during the 2024 Arab Classic, they received messages of encouragement from Mustafa describing how proud he was and reassuring them that they would reunite soon. “We got videos from people in Gaza and the West Bank watching our games back home and telling us it was making them feel better,” Ihmoud said. “If it wasn’t Palestine across our chest, we wouldn’t be playing. Especially not now and not then.”

Mustafa’s death was not the first loss that the team experienced. In March 2024, an Israeli quadcopter killed Ashraf Awad Murad, the team’s 39-year-old outfielder and captain, when checking on his family near Al-Shifa Hospital. Ashraf was a husband and a father to five children, who also played in Islamabad during the West Asia Cup. “There’s the heartbreak side of it, too,” Ihmoud said. “You can meet people, establish relationships with them, love them, and then lose them.”

As each day passes, the team’s fear increases. “The occupation army kills everything,” said Mahmoud Tafesh, “including athletes.”

“We are doing everything in our powers to represent and to do everything to show empathy and love and passion for them, but it’s not enough,” Haj said. “It’s not enough because the last news I want to hear is that a teammate passed away.”

Across the globe, sports fans have participated in demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinian athletes, calling upon governing associations like FIFA and UEFA to “show Israel the red card.” The Palestinian Federation of Baseball and Softball sent a letter calling on other federations internationally to suspend Israel’s membership and ban hosting baseball or softball events in Israel. Currently, no federations have signed on to their demands. In October, following two devastating years of Israel’s bombardment and siege on Gaza, Israel and Hamas approved phase one of a ceasefire deal.

“The least we can do as humanity is to say, ‘Until you stop killing all these people, killing all these children, destroying this entire population, maybe you can’t play baseball. Maybe you can’t play soccer,’” Suboh said. “When you’re wearing the name of a country on your chest that is so obviously trying to decimate a population, then those governing sports bodies should use their leverage to try to help.”

The Palestine National Baseball Team most recently competed in the Baseball Federation of Asia Championship Pingtan, China from September 21 to 28 where they placed fifth and once again raised the Palestinian flag in an international arena.

“I always remind everybody and also remind myself of why we’re doing this,” Suboh said. “It’s really to carry on the name of Palestine and show that Palestinians deserve the right to not just live, not just survive, not just to have food and water, but to play baseball, to play any sport, to do whatever any human in this world is afforded. That’s what we’re here for.”