Britain’s Jake Stewart won the final stage of the Four Days in Dunkirk, France, on May 18, with the Israeli team Premier-Tech, the same team whose participation in the last Vuelta a España sparked massive protests. The day after that victory, the country represented by Stewart killed another cyclist, Ahmed al Dali, in an attack in Gaza. In reality, Israel ended the life of this 33-year-old Palestinian in two parts. The first in 2014, when an Israeli bullet wounded him so seriously that he was left for dead and taken to the morgue, where he woke up. Then they had to amputate his leg. The second, on May 19, when another Israeli missile took his life while he was trying to rescue those wounded in a previous attack. Ahmed al Dali was one of the members of the Gaza Sunbirds cycling team.
All his classmates, who are now 16 years old, have one leg, just like Ahmed. Israel has maimed them in previous offensives in Gaza, in bombings or with sniper fire. At the dawn of the current invasion, in which Israel killed more than 68,000 people, Israeli planes also destroyed the warehouse containing most of the team’s bicycles in an attack in November 2023. Those that weren’t there were rendered unusable by the destruction of roads, explains Karim Ali from London. This 26-year-old Palestinian from the diaspora is the director and co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds, founded in 2020. All his athletes, he emphasizes in a video call, have “a history of struggle” behind them.
Two of them, the team’s founder, Alaa al Dali – cousin of the late Ahmed – and Mohamed Asfour were evacuated in April 2024 to Egypt and then to Belgium. The two cyclists now compete as Team Palestine, the first professional Palestinian team that managed to participate in international races such as the Para-cycling World Cup in Ostend (Belgium) and Maniago (Italy), in May, or the Asian Para-cycling Championships. Their goal is to qualify for the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles.
However, being able to raise the Palestinian flag in international competitions goes beyond sport for these cyclists, as underlined by their sports director: it is a political act. “Sport is one of many global arenas where power is challenged” and the Israeli occupation, Ali points out. The presence of the Gaza Sunbirds at these championships, he says, is “a way to remind the world” of Palestine’s right “to exist” and “to be recognized.” Israel, which denies Palestinians the right to a state, is “horrified”, he claims. The president of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, Jibril Rajoub, denounced in September that the Israeli army has killed more than a thousand athletes in two years of attacks in Gaza.
Shot
Gaza Sunbirds founder Alaa al Dali was shot by an Israeli sniper in March 2018 during the so-called Great March of Return in Gaza. He was 21 years old and rode a bicycle.
During these protests, which called for an end to the blockade of the Strip, imposed by Israel in 2007, the number of amputees “increased significantly due to Israeli snipers deliberately targeting the limbs of demonstrators”, says a report by the Institute of Palestine Studies. “Can I add another knee this afternoon?” an Israeli soldier asked his superior one day on the radio, according to the Israeli newspaper published in 2020. Haaretz.
Al Dali is one of nearly 10,000 Palestinians injured in those demonstrations. He is also one of more than 150 people who have lost limbs to Israeli gunfire. The bullets that caused his right leg to be amputated at the thigh frustrated his dream of representing Palestine at the Asian Games in Indonesia.
In the same year, billionaire Sylvain Adams, owner of the Israel Premier Tech team, managed to get the 2018 Giro d’Italia started in that country, in exchange for paying his organization 12 million euros, according to several media outlets.
Two months after the amputation, Alaa al Dali learned to ride a bicycle with one leg again and in 2020 founded the Gaza Sunbirds with Karim Ali. Its goal was to allow amputees in the Strip to exercise their right to sport. Also give them back the feeling of dignity that their wounds had taken away from them and recover their freedom. On board bicycles, Ali says, they could move around the Strip without the limitations imposed by crutches or still go “to pick up their children from school or visit their mother” without depending on the help of others.
The team’s beginnings were modest. Its members lacked almost everything and even had to “tie their feet to the pedals with duct tape,” Ali recalls, for lack of adequate pedals. Ahmed al Dali, the cyclist killed by Israel in May, trained in jeans. He couldn’t afford to buy sports clothes.
Since then, the team has been on “a long journey,” explains its co-founder. The Gaza Sunbirds now have a large network of donors and volunteers from various countries who help fund the team, which provides its athletes in Gaza with a basic income. What was a “sports” team became a “humanitarian organization” in October 2023, when Israel’s offensive began, added Akram Ajour, its humanitarian aid coordinator, in a video call from Gaza.
In the two years of Israel’s offensive, the team has distributed food parcels, hot and ready meals and shelter materials worth more than $400,000 (about 346,000 euros) to the people of Gaza, according to its website.
amputee children
Mohamed Asfour was 19 years old in 2018 when an Israeli sniper shot him during the Great March of Return. From Belgium, where he now lives, he remembers spending 18 days waiting for an Israeli permit, which never arrived, for a medical evacuation abroad that could have saved his leg. The wound became infected and doctors had to amputate the limb.
“My life took a dramatic turn. I went from being an active young man to needing help walking or going to the bathroom,” he recalls. Asfour fell into depression and weighed 41 kilos. Meeting Alaa al Dali made him see “the other side of life,” he says.
The director of the Gaza Sunbirds underlines from London that this young athlete is no longer just “that injured teenager at 19 who didn’t know what he was going to do with his life”. Now he has become “the 17th cyclist in the world in his Paralympic category”, traveling “carrying the name of Palestine” – he shows it on his jersey – and trying to be “a role model for people with disabilities”.
Gaza will need it because “an entire generation of Gazan children will grow up without limbs,” he continues. UNICEF estimates that between 3,000 and 4,000 children have suffered amputations of one or more limbs as a result of Israeli attacks in the Strip. Stories like Asfour’s can convince them, explains the director of the Gaza Sunbirds, that “there is still a future for them”.
