War at home is taking its toll on the only Palestinian athlete at the Paralympic Games

PARIS (AP) — Fadi Aldeeb got the competing out of the way early at the Paralympic Games. He’s been using the rest of the time to talk.

The only Paralympian in the Palestinian delegation in Paris, Aldeeb feels he bears special responsibility to represent all Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere. He tries not to think about his own situation.

“I’m their voice. And I want to talk and talk and talk,” the Gaza native told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

The 40-year-old Aldeeb, who uses a wheelchair, was the Palestinian flag bearer during the Games’ opening ceremony, two days before he placed last in the men’s shot put for seated athletes with a season best throw of 8.81 meters.

The winner, world record holder Ruzhdi Ruzhdi, returned to Bulgaria with his gold medal, but Aldeeb has stayed around the Paralympic Village, speaking to media about the desperate situation in his homeland following Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages.

After nearly 11 months of fighting, the war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who say about half of the dead are women and children. It has displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times. It has plunged the besieged territory into a humanitarian catastrophe, including new fears of a polio outbreak.

Aldeeb said he lost his younger brother on Dec. 6 when the building containing the family home in the Gaza City neighborhood of Shijaiyah was bombed and destroyed.

Aldeeb, who besides competing in shot put is a professional wheelchair basketball player, was playing a French league match and only saw afterward he’d received many missed calls from the brother. There was no connection when he tried calling back. Another brother told him the next day he had been killed.

Aldeeb said it made him question why he plays sport. He said the image of his brother comes to him at night and he often wonders what he was trying to say when he called during the league match.

“I received a call from his daughter, she’s like, 7 years old. I never ever can forget this,” Aldeeb said, fighting tears. “She asked me, ‘My uncle, I know he’s died and he goes – Inshallah – to Jannah, but I want his body. I don’t need his body to stay under the building, and the dogs start eating his body.’ Imagine, a child 7 years old, speaking like this.”

Aldeeb said other family members decided to scatter around the Gaza Strip to maximize their chances of survival.

“If they stay together, it’s all too easy that all of this family disappears and is killed,” he said.

Aldeeb said he hasn’t seen his own wife and children for two years because they’re still in Turkey, where he moved from Gaza in 2016 to play basketball. They can’t get a visa to join him in France, and he says he can’t get a visa to join them in Turkey without going to Gaza.

“Sometimes, you keep your feelings inside of yourself because you don’t want to show yourself, like, weak or something like that. You want to keep going because you have a big goal. You want to have it, but at the same time when you’re alone, yeah, you’re crying, you’re human,” he said.

Aldeeb said he received his life-changing injury on Oct. 4, 2001. He said he was shot in the back by an Israeli sniper when soldiers responded with bullets after some kids threw stones at an Israeli tank.

The current war is creating many more potential Paralympians, but Aldeeb said all Palestinian athletes face a lack of facilities and equipment – and difficulties leaving.

The 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended military rule, and Gaza’s borders have been sealed for months. Even before the war, athletes struggled to leave the territory for international competitions because of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after the Hamas militant group seized power in 2007.

Aldeeb wants to see future Palestinian delegations at Paralympic and Olympic competitions grow.

“We have in Gaza something the world doesn’t have – the type of players, the type of athletes. What they need are just little programs. You cannot imagine what they can do,” Aldeeb said. “I hope they can get this opportunity before they are killed, I hope.”

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Jack Leo, a student in the undergraduate certificate program at the Carmical Sports Media Institute at the University of Georgia, contributed to this report.

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AP Paralympics: https://apnews.com/hub/paralympic-games