FIFA Wants the World Watching the Game While Gaza Buries Its Goalkeepers

"Saleem Al-Ashqar was a goalkeeper, a husband, and a soon-to-be father. Now he’s another body in a war America keeps funding, FIFA keeps dodging, and the political class keeps pretending is too “complicated” to condemn."

by Ken Oswald "__yak" Vann, Jr.

FRIDAY 03 July 2026

Saleem Al-Ashqar was not a talking point. He was a 32-year-old goalkeeper, husband, brother, and soon-to-be father.

I know. The FIFA World Cup is the biggest story on the globe, but if you can imagine, some things are bigger than sports.

Saleem Al-Ashqar was a 32-year-old Palestinian goalkeeper. He played for Khadamat Khan Younis. According to the Palestinian Football Association, he was shot by Israeli forces in al-Qarara, northeast of Khan Younis. He had reportedly been married five months. His wife is pregnant. He was the only brother to seven sisters. And now he’s dead.

That’s not a “tragic incident.”

That’s the whole fuckin' point.

When you strip away the press-release language, the fake neutrality, the “complex conflict” theater, what are we actually looking at? We are watching a military machine turn an entire people into targets, then watching America act like the real emergency is tone management.

A goalkeeper.

When even the people who guard goals become targets, the word “war” starts doing a lot of laundering.

Not a general. Not a weapons manufacturer. Not some shadowy commander in a bunker. A goalkeeper.

And even if he had never touched a football in his life, that would not make this less grotesque. But sports is supposed to be the universal language, right? The one place where everybody pretends humanity still exists. That’s why this killing matters during the FIFA World Cup conversation. The world is sitting around arguing brackets, national pride, penalties, and legacy, while Palestinian football is burying players like this is just part of the schedule.

The Palestinian Football Association says Israeli forces have killed 1,009 Palestinian athletes since October 2023, including 567 people from the football community alone.

Read that again.

Five hundred sixty-seven from football.

This is not a sports tragedy. This is a sports culture being erased in public.

That’s not collateral damage. That’s not fog of war. That’s not “oops, wrong building.” That’s a society being dismantled in public while FIFA does its usual corrupt uncle routine—standing in the kitchen, pretending it didn’t see who stole the rent money.

And FIFA already knows what this is. In March, FIFA fined the Israel Football Association 150,000 Swiss francs over racism and discrimination breaches, but still declined to act against Israeli clubs operating from West Bank settlements, calling the legal status “complex.”

The FIFA World Tournament gets treated like global unity. Palestinian football is being asked to disappear quietly.

“Complex” is one of those words institutions use when the truth would cost them sponsors.

America does that shit too, lol.

The right doesn’t care because Israel lets them launder their worst instincts through foreign policy. They get to cheer occupation, bombing, apartheid logic, walls, collective punishment, and religious nationalism—but call it “security.” It’s white grievance with an Iron Dome.

The left is quieter, but don’t let them off the hook either. A lot of them know exactly what this is. They just don’t want to lose donors, invitations, institutional proximity, campaign money, media access, or the right kind of friends. So they mumble. They “both sides” a massacre. They turn genocide into a branding problem.

And yes, I said genocide.

American politics has turned Palestinian death into a bipartisan exercise in looking away.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. A UN commission said in June 2026 that Israeli authorities and security forces continue committing genocide and atrocity crimes through the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children.

So no, this is not just me being “emotional.”

This is me noticing that everybody suddenly becomes a constitutional lawyer, military expert, hostage negotiator, theologian, historian, and trauma counselor the second a Palestinian corpse enters the conversation.

Y’all can’t be serious.

And the journalists? Let’s talk about them too, because that’s where the lie gets even uglier. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Israeli forces have killed 207 Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza during this war, with CPJ determining that at least 75 journalists and media workers were directly targeted and killed by Israeli forces in reprisal for their work. CPJ also reports 174 journalists injured, 2 missing, and 108 arrested.

You don’t kill this many journalists by accident. You kill witnesses when witnesses become dangerous.

That is not an accident.

That is not confusion.

That is what you do when witnesses are inconvenient.

You kill the people. Then you kill the people documenting the killing. Then you call everybody antisemitic for noticing the pattern.

And before somebody tries that lazy trick—no, criticizing Israel is not criticizing Jewish people. Judaism is not the problem. Jewish people are not the problem. The problem is Zionism as state power: an ethno-nationalist project protected by Western elites like it is the last sacred cow in the room.

Zionism has become the only acceptable form of white supremacy among respectable people.

That’s why politicians who would faint over a Confederate flag will turn around and defend settlements, occupation, apartheid roads, bombing refugee camps, starving children, killing journalists, and shooting football players.

They don’t hate supremacy.

They hate when supremacy has bad branding.

Saleem Al-Ashqar should be alive. His child should meet him. His wife should not be turned into another sentence in another article. His sisters should not have to bury their only brother while the world debates whether Palestinians are allowed to be mourned without an asterisk.

This isn’t complicated.

The world keeps debating whether Palestinians are allowed to be mourned without an asterisk.

A state that kills athletes, children, doctors, journalists, aid workers, and civilians—and still gets defended by the most powerful country on earth—is not defending civilization.

It is showing you who civilization was built to protect.