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The Palestinian Ring: Boxing, women, and bombings in Gaza

A poster of Mike Tyson waves above the ring’s blue and red ropes. He was Farah and Abu’s idol, along with Muhammad Ali. And now it’s gone.
Gone, just like the punching bags, gloves, and photos of the girls boxing, including Rima’s, that once were scattered throughout the gym. All have been destroyed by the senselessness of war. Of the Palestine Boxing Center, the first boxing gym for women in the Gaza Strip, only rubble remains. Or almost. The desire to keep fighting has actually been rekindled, and it’s stronger than ever.
“Since the beginning of the war, not only our homes and our boxing club were destroyed, but also our memories and dreams”, says Osama Ayoub, founder of the project Gaza Boxing Women. But then something changed. “When they took us to the displacement camps in Rafah, I decided to organize a team there to revive boxing despite the lack of resources,’ says Osama. As of today they continue training in Khan Yunis.
Osama and the team are also offering entertainment and other activities to counter the fear and anxiety that many kids and women feel. This type of support also includes the noble art of boxing, in the hope of drowning out the bombing, because, as Osama says, “the war won’t stop our dream to box.”


Gaza Boxing Women began putting down roots in 2016. At the time, Osama was part of the Palestinian national boxing team, with which he had toured the Arab world. When he went to Lebanon with the team was when he first saw women training. “That’s how the idea of creating a women’s boxing club in the Gaza Strip was born,” Osama says.
Back in Palestine, he began to train kids of all genders and to his surprise, “the reactions in the neighborhood were very positive and word of mouth spread throughout the Strip.” The group expanded and the room at home was no longer enough. But as the number of boys and girls increased, so did the criticism.
“As we began training in busier neighborhoods, both men and women criticized us, including on social media.” But Osama and the team carried on. A few years later, however, a young woman named Rima Abu Rhama contacted him. She was 21 years old at the time. No longer a child, she was a woman. And she wanted to box.
Rima recalls, “It was 2020 and I was looking for some self-defense sports, but these weren’t exactly available for women. Then I found Coach Osama. I asked him if he could coach me too.” ‘He said, ‘I don’t have a place yet…and society… But we’ll come up with something.”
That’s the spirit of Gaza: one that creates beautiful things even from nothing and seeks solutions. They started training in a basement near their homes and in order to split the costs, Rima convinced her sister and a few friends to join. “We had a lot of fun. Boxing is not a common sport, so many girls saw our Instagram stories and started to get interested and wanting to participate. We became [a group of] ten. Then fifteen. And then many more,” Rima remembers. At one point Osama was training up to forty girls and from that, the first women’s boxing club in Palestine was born.


They call boxing “the loneliest sport”: the one that makes you reflect on yourself. Through the breath. The technique. The controlled emotions that pass from the mind to the arms and feet of those in the ring and are released with direct, fast, incisive punches, such as the jab.
“For me, boxing was a fight and a challenge. I started it because I wanted to get stronger physically. It’s a sport that opens up so many possibilities for women, which is another reason I continued. I wanted to show Palestinian girls that even when they were older women they could continue boxing,” says Rima.
“Sport is a unique vector of socialization. It connects people of all backgrounds and mindsets, like us for instance,” recalls Rima, “We were all different: different ages, different contexts, and with different ideas, yet the sport has brought us all together. Along with Osama, we became one big family. We had a lot of fun together, including outside of the ring, when we’d go out after training. It was a way to get to know the other girls’ cultures. We had one thing in common: we had to fight together. The fight didn’t begin when we put the gloves on but much earlier—because we had to fight to be able to even wear those gloves, and this realization brought us even closer.”
In fact, media interest came after a photographer friend of theirs started taking pictures. After that, many people started criticizing both Osama and the girls, to the point where they were threatening him and calling on the government to end the project on behalf of “religious, social, and cultural motivations.”
“We got over it because we knew we weren’t doing anything wrong. We have always been very respectful. Some women wanted to learn from a female coach, so Osama started training female boxers to become coaches themselves. We started inviting feminists and more traditional leaders of society, because if they accepted us, everyone else would respect us too,” Rima recalls. “Sometimes it’s a slow process. It takes time. And who knows, maybe after the war we might have to start from scratch, but it was worth it.”

It has not been easy, but as Osama says, “strength and determination are what allowed us to continue and expand women’s boxing in Palestine.” Which is the same spirit of Quarticciolo, a neighborhood in Rome that might seem far away in more ways than one from the Gaza Strip, but whose story is actually intertwined with Gaza Boxing Women. In fact, the first and only gym where Osama and the girls were training was built thanks to fundraising efforts and donations carried out by the Roman group Boxe Contro l’Assedio , or Boxing Against the Occupation, in English. This project was born in 2018 from the idea of community gyms (in Quarticciolo, Tufello - another Roman neighborhood, and Palermo) to create a bridge with Gaza, given their shared values and concepts. The group went to Gaza a few times over the years with the goal of developing a proper boxing club with Osama. This goal became reality when the “Palestine Boxing Center” was inaugurated in 2022.
That first gym in Gaza City had the PBC initials. “It was bright, accessible, and open”, as Daniele Napolitano, a photojournalist who had been following the boxing project for years, recalls. “Gaza is a place that from day one took the images I had in my head and turned them upside down. And seeing the girls in line, waiting to meet us in the gym, for the umpteenth time broke my balance.”
Fabrizio Troya, one of the coaches of Boxe Contro l’Assedio, went to Gaza at the end of September 2022 with the group as a trainer, and echoes the worldwide criticism of Gaza as an open-air prison. “My entry was very traumatic. Arriving at the Israeli border was like arriving at the end of the world: hours and hours of interrogations, visas, and international papers, which would ensure our entry, with guns drawn” he says.
They promised themselves they would come back, that they would wake up in the morning and have coffee with everyone. The memories often become clearer with time— memories like walking along the seafront before training, dinners with local dishes, or the fields of carnations and strawberries. “Even today, especially today, we should remember that under the bombings there was a university neighborhood, hundreds of young people enjoying and having fun. We tend to think about these places as places of death and destruction. But Gaza was full of life. As were the girls. They wanted to go out, learn, study…” says Napolitano.
Due to the even more restricted movement between the north and south of the Gaza Strip lately, Osama has been out of contact with the girls for 130 days. Osama recalls, “I learned with great sadness of the martyrdom of two girls from the boxing club and their families.” But the goals remain. “My wish is for the war to end, of course. And then to rebuild the gym and complete our dream: raising the Palestinian flag at international sporting events,” he says.
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{
"article":
{
"title" : "The Palestinian Ring: Boxing, women, and bombings in Gaza",
"author" : "Paola Arrigoni",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/gaza-boxing",
"date" : "2024-09-13 00:00:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/gazaboxingIMG_0089.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "A poster of Mike Tyson waves above the ring’s blue and red ropes. He was Farah and Abu’s idol, along with Muhammad Ali. And now it’s gone.Gone, just like the punching bags, gloves, and photos of the girls boxing, including Rima’s, that once were scattered throughout the gym. All have been destroyed by the senselessness of war. Of the Palestine Boxing Center, the first boxing gym for women in the Gaza Strip, only rubble remains. Or almost. The desire to keep fighting has actually been rekindled, and it’s stronger than ever.“Since the beginning of the war, not only our homes and our boxing club were destroyed, but also our memories and dreams”, says Osama Ayoub, founder of the project Gaza Boxing Women. But then something changed. “When they took us to the displacement camps in Rafah, I decided to organize a team there to revive boxing despite the lack of resources,’ says Osama. As of today they continue training in Khan Yunis.Osama and the team are also offering entertainment and other activities to counter the fear and anxiety that many kids and women feel. This type of support also includes the noble art of boxing, in the hope of drowning out the bombing, because, as Osama says, “the war won’t stop our dream to box.”Gaza Boxing Women began putting down roots in 2016. At the time, Osama was part of the Palestinian national boxing team, with which he had toured the Arab world. When he went to Lebanon with the team was when he first saw women training. “That’s how the idea of creating a women’s boxing club in the Gaza Strip was born,” Osama says.Back in Palestine, he began to train kids of all genders and to his surprise, “the reactions in the neighborhood were very positive and word of mouth spread throughout the Strip.” The group expanded and the room at home was no longer enough. But as the number of boys and girls increased, so did the criticism.“As we began training in busier neighborhoods, both men and women criticized us, including on social media.” But Osama and the team carried on. A few years later, however, a young woman named Rima Abu Rhama contacted him. She was 21 years old at the time. No longer a child, she was a woman. And she wanted to box.Rima recalls, “It was 2020 and I was looking for some self-defense sports, but these weren’t exactly available for women. Then I found Coach Osama. I asked him if he could coach me too.” ‘He said, ‘I don’t have a place yet…and society… But we’ll come up with something.”That’s the spirit of Gaza: one that creates beautiful things even from nothing and seeks solutions. They started training in a basement near their homes and in order to split the costs, Rima convinced her sister and a few friends to join. “We had a lot of fun. Boxing is not a common sport, so many girls saw our Instagram stories and started to get interested and wanting to participate. We became [a group of] ten. Then fifteen. And then many more,” Rima remembers. At one point Osama was training up to forty girls and from that, the first women’s boxing club in Palestine was born.They call boxing “the loneliest sport”: the one that makes you reflect on yourself. Through the breath. The technique. The controlled emotions that pass from the mind to the arms and feet of those in the ring and are released with direct, fast, incisive punches, such as the jab.“For me, boxing was a fight and a challenge. I started it because I wanted to get stronger physically. It’s a sport that opens up so many possibilities for women, which is another reason I continued. I wanted to show Palestinian girls that even when they were older women they could continue boxing,” says Rima.“Sport is a unique vector of socialization. It connects people of all backgrounds and mindsets, like us for instance,” recalls Rima, “We were all different: different ages, different contexts, and with different ideas, yet the sport has brought us all together. Along with Osama, we became one big family. We had a lot of fun together, including outside of the ring, when we’d go out after training. It was a way to get to know the other girls’ cultures. We had one thing in common: we had to fight together. The fight didn’t begin when we put the gloves on but much earlier—because we had to fight to be able to even wear those gloves, and this realization brought us even closer.”In fact, media interest came after a photographer friend of theirs started taking pictures. After that, many people started criticizing both Osama and the girls, to the point where they were threatening him and calling on the government to end the project on behalf of “religious, social, and cultural motivations.”“We got over it because we knew we weren’t doing anything wrong. We have always been very respectful. Some women wanted to learn from a female coach, so Osama started training female boxers to become coaches themselves. We started inviting feminists and more traditional leaders of society, because if they accepted us, everyone else would respect us too,” Rima recalls. “Sometimes it’s a slow process. It takes time. And who knows, maybe after the war we might have to start from scratch, but it was worth it.”It has not been easy, but as Osama says, “strength and determination are what allowed us to continue and expand women’s boxing in Palestine.” Which is the same spirit of Quarticciolo, a neighborhood in Rome that might seem far away in more ways than one from the Gaza Strip, but whose story is actually intertwined with Gaza Boxing Women. In fact, the first and only gym where Osama and the girls were training was built thanks to fundraising efforts and donations carried out by the Roman group Boxe Contro l’Assedio , or Boxing Against the Occupation, in English. This project was born in 2018 from the idea of community gyms (in Quarticciolo, Tufello - another Roman neighborhood, and Palermo) to create a bridge with Gaza, given their shared values and concepts. The group went to Gaza a few times over the years with the goal of developing a proper boxing club with Osama. This goal became reality when the “Palestine Boxing Center” was inaugurated in 2022.That first gym in Gaza City had the PBC initials. “It was bright, accessible, and open”, as Daniele Napolitano, a photojournalist who had been following the boxing project for years, recalls. “Gaza is a place that from day one took the images I had in my head and turned them upside down. And seeing the girls in line, waiting to meet us in the gym, for the umpteenth time broke my balance.”Fabrizio Troya, one of the coaches of Boxe Contro l’Assedio, went to Gaza at the end of September 2022 with the group as a trainer, and echoes the worldwide criticism of Gaza as an open-air prison. “My entry was very traumatic. Arriving at the Israeli border was like arriving at the end of the world: hours and hours of interrogations, visas, and international papers, which would ensure our entry, with guns drawn” he says.They promised themselves they would come back, that they would wake up in the morning and have coffee with everyone. The memories often become clearer with time— memories like walking along the seafront before training, dinners with local dishes, or the fields of carnations and strawberries. “Even today, especially today, we should remember that under the bombings there was a university neighborhood, hundreds of young people enjoying and having fun. We tend to think about these places as places of death and destruction. But Gaza was full of life. As were the girls. They wanted to go out, learn, study…” says Napolitano.Due to the even more restricted movement between the north and south of the Gaza Strip lately, Osama has been out of contact with the girls for 130 days. Osama recalls, “I learned with great sadness of the martyrdom of two girls from the boxing club and their families.” But the goals remain. “My wish is for the war to end, of course. And then to rebuild the gym and complete our dream: raising the Palestinian flag at international sporting events,” he says."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Black Liberation Views on Palestine",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/black-liberation-on-palestine",
"date" : "2025-10-17 09:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/mandela-keffiyeh.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "In understanding global politics, it is important to look at Black liberation struggles as one important source of moral perspective. So, when looking at Palestine, we look to Black leaders to see how they perceived the Palestinian struggle in relation to theirs, from the 1960’s to today.Why must we understand where the injustice lies? Because, as Desmond Tutu famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”{% for person in site.data.quotes-black-liberation-palestine %}{{ person.name }}{% for quote in person.quotes %}“{{ quote.text }}”{% if quote.source %}— {{ quote.source }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}{% endfor %}"
}
,
{
"title" : "First Anniversary Celebration of EIP",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "events",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/1st-anniversary-of-eip",
"date" : "2025-10-14 18:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/WSA_EIP_Launch_Cover.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent Publishing",
"content" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent PublishingJoin Everything is Political on November 21st for the launch of our End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine.This members-only evening will feature a benefit dinner, cocktails, and live performances in celebration of a year of independent media, critical voices, and collective resistance.The EventNovember 21, 2025, 7-11pmLower Manhattan, New YorkLaunching our End-of-Year Special Edition MagazineSpecial appearances and performancesFood & Drink includedTickets are extremely limited, reserve yours now!Become an annual print member: get x back issues of EIP, receive the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine, and come to the Anniversary Celebration.$470Already a member? Sign in to get your special offer. Buy Ticket $150 Just $50 ! and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine Buy ticket $150 and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine "
}
,
{
"title" : "Miu Miu Transforms the Apron From Trad Wife to Boss Lady: The sexiest thing in Paris was a work garment",
"author" : "Khaoula Ghanem",
"category" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/miu-miu-transforms-the-apron-from-trad-wife-to-boss-lady",
"date" : "2025-10-14 13:05:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_MiuMiu_Apron.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.",
"content" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.From the opening look—German actress Sandra Hüller in a utilitarian deep-blue apron layered over a barn jacket and neat blue shirting—the thesis was loud: the “cover” becomes the thing itself. As silhouettes marched on, aprons multiplied and mutated—industrial drill cotton with front pockets, raw canvas, taffeta and cloqué silk, lace-edged versions that flirted with lingerie, even black leather and crystal-studded incarnations that reframed function as ornament. What the apron traditionally shields (clothes, bodies, “the good dress”) was inverted; the protection became the prized surface. Prada herself spelled it out: “The apron is my favorite piece of clothing… it symbolizes women, from factories through to serving to the home.”Miu Miu Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear. SuppliedThis inversion matters historically. The apron’s earliest fashion-adjacent life was industrial. It served as a barrier against grease, heat, stain. It was a token of paid and unpaid care. Miu Miu tapped that lineage directly (canvas, work belts, D-ring hardware), then sliced it against domestic codes (florals, ruffles, crochet), and finally pushed into nightlife with bejeweled and leather bibs. The garment’s migration across materials made its social migrations visible. It is a kitchen apron, yes, but also one for labs, hospitals, and factories; the set and styling insisted on that plurality.What makes the apron such a loaded emblem is not just what it covers, but what it reveals about who has always been working. Before industrialization formalized labor into factory shifts and wages, women were already performing invisible labour, the kind that doesn’t exist on payrolls but sits at the foundation of every functioning society. They were cooking, cleaning, raising children, nursing the ill. These tasks were foundational to every economy and yet absent from every ledger. Even when women entered the industrial workforce, from textile plants to wartime assembly lines, their domestic responsibilities did not disappear, they doubled. In that context, the apron here is a quiet manifesto for the strength that goes unrecorded, unthanked, and yet keeps civilization running.The algorithmic rise of the “tradwife,” the influencer economy that packages domesticity as soft power, is the contemporary cultural shadow here. Miu Miu’s apron refuses that rehearsal. In fact, it’s intentionally awkward—oversized, undone, worn over bikinis or with sturdy shoes—so the viewer can’t flatten it into Pinterest-ready nostalgia. Critics noted the collection as a reclamation, a rebuttal to the flattening forces of the feed: the apron as a uniform for endurance rather than submission. The show notes framed it simply as “a consideration of the work of women,” a reminder that the invisible economies of effort—paid, unpaid, emotional—still structure daily life.If that sounds unusually explicit for a luxury runway, consider the designer. Prada trained as a mime at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, earned a PhD in political science, joined the Italian Communist Party, and was active in the women’s rights movement in 1970s Milan. Those facts are not trivia; they are the grammar of her clothes. Decades of “ugly chic” were, essentially, a slow campaign against easy consumption and default beauty. In 2026, the apron becomes the newest dialect. An emblem drawn from leftist feminist history, recoded into a product that still has to sell. That tension—belief versus business—is the Miuccia paradox, and it’s precisely why these aprons read as statements, not trends.The runway narrative traced a journey from function to fetish. Early looks were squarely utilitarian—thick cottons, pocketed bibs—before migrating toward fragility and sparkle. Lace aprons laid transparently over swimmers; crystal-studded aprons slipped across cocktail territory; leather apron-dresses stiffened posture into armor. The sequencing proposed the same silhouette can encode labor, intimacy, and spectacle depending on fabrication. If most brands smuggle “workwear” in as set dressing, Miu Miu forced it onto the body as the central garment and an unmissable reminder that the feminine is often asked to be both shield and display at once.It’s instructive to read this collection against the house’s last mega-viral object: the micro-mini of Spring 2022, a pleated, raw-hem wafer that colonized timelines and magazine covers. That skirt’s thesis was exposure—hip bones and hemlines as post-lockdown spectacle, Y2K nostalgia framed as liberation-lite. The apron, ironically, covers. Where the micro-mini trafficked in the optics of freedom (and the speed of virality), the apron asks about the conditions that make freedom possible: who launders, who cooks, who cares? To move from “look at me” to “who is working here?” is a pivot from optics to ethics, without abandoning desire. (The aprons are, after all, deeply covetable.) In a platform economy that still rewards the shortest hemline with the biggest click-through, this is a sophisticated counter-program.Yet the designer is not romanticizing toil. There’s wit in the ruffles and perversity in the crystals; neither negate labor, they metabolize it. The most striking image is the apron treated as couture-adjacent. Traditionally, an apron protects the precious thing beneath; here, the apron is the precious thing. You could call that hypocrisy—luxurizing the uniform of workers. Or, strategy, insisting that the symbols of care and effort deserve visibility and investment.Of course, none of this exists in a vacuum. The “tradwife” script thrives because it is aesthetically legible and commercially scalable. It packages gender ideology as moodboard. Miu Miu counters with garments whose legibility flickers. The collection’s best looks ask viewers to reconcile tenderness with toughness, convenience with care, which is exactly the mental choreography demanded of women in every context from office to home to online.If you wanted a season-defining “It” item, you’ll still find it. The apron is poised to proliferate across fast-fashion and luxury alike. But the deeper success is structural: Miu Miu re-centered labor as an aesthetic category. That’s rarer than a viral skirt. It’s a reminder that clothes don’t merely decorate life, they describe and negotiate it. In making the apron the subject rather than the prop, Prada turned a garment of service into a platform for agency. It’s precisely the kind of cultural recursion you’d expect from a designer shaped by feminist politics, who never stopped treating fashion as an instrument of thought as much as style.The last image to hold onto is deceptively simple: a woman in an apron, neither fetishized nor infantilized, striding, hands free. Not a costume for nostalgia, not a meme for the feed, but a working uniform reframed, respected, and suddenly, undeniably beautiful. That is Miu Miu’s provocation for Spring 2026: the work behind the work, made visible at last."
}
]
}