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

A dramatic shot of a girl punching a bag, gloves on, in the boxing gym

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.”

A row of girls & young women practice their boxing stances

A young girl, leans relaxing on her arms, with boxing gloves

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.

A row of young women keep their right fist to her cheek, holding out their left

A teacher points to the feet of his student, making sure her stance is correct

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.