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Shot Putter Paralyzed by Israeli Sniper Is Palestine's Lone Paralympian
"I want to raise my country flag here in Paris and to show the people we are still here," said Fadi Deeb. "We're still alive—we have hopes, we have dreams, we have goals."
Aug 12, 2024
Following an Olympic Games that activists said was tainted by the participation Israeli athletes including a flag-bearer who signed bombs bound for Gaza, a shot putter who was disabled by an Israeli sniper and who lost at least 17 relatives to Israel's onslaught is set to be the sole Palestinian competitor at the upcoming Paralympics in Paris.
"I want to raise my country flag here in Paris and to show the people we are still here," 39-year-old Fadi Deeb said during a Monday interview with Democracy Now! ahead of the August 28 Paralympic Opening Ceremony. "We're still alive—we have hopes, we have dreams, we have goals."
"There is no safe place in Gaza... everyone is like a target for the killing machine."
Deeb, who is from Gaza City, was shot in the spine by an Israeli sniper in 2001 during the Second Intifada, or general Palestinian uprising.
"It's a very hard situation to... balance between my sport as an international player and one who is going to compete in the Paralympic Games, and... my family, all of my sisters, my brothers still in Gaza Strip," he explained.
"There is no safe place in Gaza... everyone is like a target for the killing machine," Deeb continued. "So, what is happening now... it's a genocide. It's not a war... I lost my brother on December 7, 2023 and two of my nephews... And for whole of my family members, I lost like more than, like, 17 persons. So, the situation is very hard."
The Palestinian death toll from Israel's 311-day bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza surged toward 40,000 on Monday, according to local and international officials, with at least an additional 103,000 people wounded or missing. Most of those killed have been women and children.
Almost all of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, while Israel's total blockade of the coastal enclave has forced the starvation of at least hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Dozens of Gazans—almost all of them children—have died from malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of medical care.
Asked by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman about the "amputation crisis" in Gaza—the charity Save the Children says an average of 10 children a day have lost one or more limbs during the war—Deeb said that it's "a very hard situation, because, as I told before, there's no difference... if you are children or women... everyone is a target."
According to the Palestine Olympic Committee and Palestine Football Association (PFA), at least 400 Palestinian athletes, including nearly 70 children, have been killed by Israeli forces since October as of July 26. Among the dead are Hany Al-Masry, a former player and general manager of the Palestinian Olympic soccer team.
Still, eight Palestinians managed to compete in the Paris Olympics, although they did not win any medals.
The International Olympic Committee has been accused of double standards for banning Russian athletes over their country's invasion of Ukraine but allowing Israeli athletes—including Israel Defense Forces veterans and an Olympic flag-bearer who recently signed bombs to be dropped on Gaza—to compete.
Last week, PFA president Jibril Rajub
called Israel's alleged deliberate targeting of Palestinian athletes a blatant violation of the Olympic Charter.
Despite all this, Deeb said he is hopeful.
"To be a player and to compete in this competition for the Paris 2024... gives me, like, too much responsibility to talk about my country, to show the people about Palestine," he said. "It's not just war. It's not just blood. There is life. There is hopes. There is goals. There is dreams."
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In Praise of Refugee Athletes Competing at the Olympic Games
Providing world-class athletes dispossessed from their homes a chance to compete in the Olympic games is a gift—to them and their communities, and to the rest of us watching and cheering them on. But at the end of the day, the need for such a team speaks to our failure.
Aug 06, 2024
It was a spectacular parade of lighted boats filled with some of the best athletes in the world that sailed up the Seine to open the 2024 Olympics. Among them, second in line following the Greek team, traditionally the first to enter the Olympic stadium, was a small craft filled with 37 competitors in white uniforms, grinning and waving to the thousands of spectators. Their flag carrier was boxer Cindy Ngamba. A few days later she would win the first Olympic medal for her team.
But Ngamba, from Cameroon, did not win that bronze medal for her home country. And the flag that Ngamba, from Cameroon, and her co-flag-bearer Yahya al Ghotany, from Syria, waved proudly above their heads was not that of either their countries. Ngamba and al Ghotany are members of the Refugee Olympic Team, carrying the Olympic flag and wearing the five interlocked circles on their jackets. Their flag is raised to the notes of the Olympic hymn, not their national anthems.
The idea of a refugee team first emerged in 2016—and unfortunately not much has changed. Like before, all of the athletes on the team have been forced from their homes by some combination of war, exploding climate change, massive human rights violations, and economic crisis. This year the 37 members of the Refugee Olympic Team have something else in common: all of their home countries are facing often crippling U.S. economic sanctions.
This year the 37 members of the Refugee Olympic Team have something else in common: all of their home countries are facing often crippling U.S. economic sanctions.
The Rio Olympics in 2016 took place in the midst of the mass displacement crisis resulting from the civil war in Syria. At that time, there were 67 million people in the world forcibly displaced, a population comparable to that of France and bigger than those of Italy or South Africa. If it were a country, Refugee Nation would have been the 23rd largest population in the world.
By the time of the Tokyo games in 2021, Refugee Nation had grown to 82 million and was then the 20th largest in the world, situated just between Thailand and Germany.
And this year, as the 2024 Olympic torch was lit in Paris, the number of forcibly displaced people has soared to 107 million, and Refugee Nation has risen through the ranks to become the 15th largest population in the world—just behind Egypt.
Forced displacement has been on the rise for a very long time. And the conditions driving people from their homes—war, repression, economic and climate crises—are on the rise as well. In 2016 war was the biggest reason people were forced to leave their homes. By 2021 wars were still raging, but climate crises and especially the Covid-19 pandemic were creating refugees by the millions.
And all those crises—and the resulting escalation in forced migration—were and continue to be made significantly worse by U.S. economic sanctions. Two years before the Rio Olympics, the UN Human Rights Council expressed alarm at “the disproportionate and indiscriminate human costs of unilateral sanctions and their negative effects on the civilian population.”
In Iran, for example, the U.S. imposed extreme sanctions in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal despite recognition by the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency that Tehran was in compliance with the deal’s requirements. The sanctions’ impact on civilians was dire. According to Human Rights Watch, the sanctions “pose a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines,” something especially dangerous during the Covid-19 pandemic that was about to hit. While the Biden administration lifted some of those Trump-era sanctions, many remain in place and were significantly tightened in April 2024. Fourteen members of the Olympic Refugee Team are from Iran.
Whatever the specific conditions that forced each of them to leave their homes, U.S. policy is one of the factors that made things worse in their countries.
In Afghanistan, sanctions cause famine. In 2022, head of the International Rescue Committee and former UK foreign minister David Miliband told the U.S. Senate that the policy of cutting Afghanistan off from financial flows—aka sanctions—was “the proximate cause of this starvation crisis.” Five of the Refugee Team come from Afghanistan.
The 37 athletes brought audiences to their feet, on the banks of the Seine and on screens around the world. But the triumph and beauty of the Refugee Team, and all that these young people have accomplished despite having been forced to leave their homes, cannot hide the stark reality that mass displacement on a global scale has become the new normal. And whatever the specific conditions that forced each of them to leave their homes, U.S. policy is one of the factors that made things worse in their countries.
Providing world-class athletes dispossessed from their homes a chance to compete in the Olympic games is a gift—to them and their communities, and to the rest of us watching and cheering them on. But at the end of the day, the need for such a team speaks to our failure—to stop the normalization of forced displacement, and to reverse the conditions that create it in the first place. Including ending U.S. economic sanctions. The chance to win a medal in Paris is great—but wouldn’t it be better if these amazing athletes could instead win the right to return safely home instead?
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French Court Strikes Down Ban on Israeli Participation in Paris Arms Expo
The Paris Commercial Court ruled that the French Defense Ministry's prohibition on Israeli entry to the Eurosatory exhibition amounts to illegal discrimination.
Jun 18, 2024
A French court on Tuesday overruled what it determined was a discriminatory ban on Israeli weapons companies' participation in one of the world's premier arms expositions.
The Paris Commercial Court reversed the French Ministry of Defense's May 31 prohibition of Israeli entry to the Eurosatory exhibition, held biennially at the Paris Nord Villepinte Exhibition Center. The ministry decided to ban Israel from the event—which runs from June 17-21—following the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) May 26 attack on a refugee encampment in Rafah that killed or wounded hundreds of Palestinians, including many women and children.
However, the commercial court concurred with the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce's assertion that COGES Events, the company that organizes the expo, unfairly discriminated against Israeli exhibitors.
A separate decision by the Bobigny District Court directing COGES Events to ban any employees or representatives of Israeli companies from participating in expo was not directly addressed by Tuesday's ruling.
The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions hailed Tuesday's ruling as a "victory against the exclusion of Israel."
As the European Union weighed sanctioning Israel over the massacre, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Paris to condemn the Rafah tent massacre. French President Emmanuel Macron said he was "outraged" over the attack and asserted that Israel's killing and maiming of civilians "must stop."
"There are no safe areas in Rafah for Palestinian civilians," he said. "I call for full respect for international law and an immediate cease-fire."
The French Ministry of Defense subsequently said that "the conditions are no longer right to host Israeli companies at the Paris show, given that the French president is calling for the cessation of IDF operations in Rafah."
Israel's conduct in the Gaza onslaught—which according to Palestinian and international agencies has left more than 133,000 Gazans dead, injured, or missing since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel—is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case brought by South Africa and backed by over 30 countries and regional blocs.
Since Israel began its devastating retaliation for the October 7 attack, people worldwide have called for countries to cut off diplomatic and weapons support for Israeli forces. Over the past eight months there have also been protests in Paris and throughout France calling for a Gaza cease-fire.
Exports by Israeli arms firms soared to a record $13.1 billion last year, up from $12.5 billion in 2022,
according to Israel's Ministry of Defense.
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