He ran for peace, and Palestine. His journey has ended
The Gaza that Majed Abu Maraheel knew is gone; the refugee camp he spent decades in has been bombed. He lives on now in those who remember the Olympian.
In Majed Abu Maraheel’s life lies the short, brutal history of modern Palestine.
Maraheel, the first Palestinian athlete to compete at the Olympics, was born into a Bedouin family who farmed an ancestral plot on the coastal edge of the Negev desert, and lived with their sheep in the oasis town of Beersheba nearby.
The Bedouin’s have lived, uninterrupted, in this region for 4,000 years. Nonetheless, Maraheel’s parents were among the estimated 7 lakh people forced to flee during the nakba (literally, catastrophe in Arabic; now used as a byword for mass expulsion) in 1948, when the Israel Defense Forces began to colonise their homelands.
Maraheel’s parents, shorn of their land, animals and home, found themselves at the first of what would become the eternal refugee camps of Gaza, Nuseirat.
Maraheel’s circumstances could not suppress his innate athleticism. No matter which NGO-run school the boy attended, he emerged as the star football player. He dreamt of playing at the international level. Instead, by his teen years, he found himself working as a labourer, tending to flowers at Israeli greenhouses. He had to walk 20 km every day to get to one of only two points of entry and exit from Gaza, where he could finally board a bus to work.
Amid this ordeal of a commute, he found another calling: running. He was fast. He didn’t tire easily. Hot, cold or rainy, Maraheel began to revel in his morning run.
In 1991, aged 18, Maraheel was shot in the arm during a skirmish between locals and Israeli forces. The bullet shattered a bone, but he was back to running soon. He was playing football again too, and became a known name on the Gaza strip.
In 1995, after watching him win a race there, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat invited him to work as his bodyguard. That opened the door to better training facilities and resources, as well as to more time and encouragement for his career as an athlete. That year, Maraheel ran in his first international competition, at the Arab Athletics Championships in Cairo. He was slated to run at the 1996 Paris Marathon, but the Israeli government would not issue the paperwork he needed to leave Gaza.
The 1996 Atlanta Olympics soon followed and 23-year-old Maraheel, with help from the International Olympic Committee, led the first Palestinian Olympic team, a delegation of two runners (him and Ihab Salama, 21). As bearer of the flag, his job, he said “was to remind the world that Palestine exists”. When he ran, in the 10,000m, he said he was running for “peace, and only peace”.
For a few years, Maraheel became the face of Palestinian sports, moving to Germany to attend university and participating in many international races. By the turn of the century, he had returned home as a premier athletics coach, training runners who would go on to race at the Asian Games and the Olympics.
In 2014, an Israeli jet bombed his Gaza neighbourhood, injuring Maraheel’s son Khaled, who was left with a missile fragment lodged in his head. Not much is known of how his family coped once Israel began bombing Gaza in October 2023. There were news reports that they tried to flee but were forced to turn back.
What is now known is that Maraheel, who suffered from a kidney ailment, went without treatment for months as roads, hospitals and clinics were bombed.
He died on June 11, 2024, at Nuseirat. Evacuation orders and bombings have left the camp unrecognisable in the months since. There is nothing left of Maraheel, except among those who remember him.
(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)
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