The Israeli military says eleven Palestinian soccer players, referees, and coaches it struck during the Gaza war were not innocent civilians but active members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a direct challenge to a years-long international campaign demanding Israel's suspension from FIFA.
The IDF provided an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital naming eleven individuals from the Palestinian soccer community it killed during operations in the Gaza Strip, alleging each served in the military wings of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Three of the eleven, the IDF claims, took part in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The disclosure follows what the IDF described as a deliberate disinformation effort to cast the strikes as targeted attacks on athletes.
The timing is pointed. For more than two years, the Palestinian Football Association and its president, Jibril Rajoub, have lobbied FIFA and the International Olympic Committee to ban Israel from international competition. The PFA has cited the mounting death toll among Palestinian athletes, roughly 1,009 members of its athletic community killed since October 2023, a figure reported by Al Jazeera, and the destruction of sports facilities across Gaza as grounds for an immediate, indefinite suspension.
FIFA refused. Its Disciplinary Committee rejected the PFA's demand outright. Instead, FIFA fined the Israel Football Association 150,000 Swiss francs, about $190,700, for what the governing body called multiple breaches of anti-discrimination obligations. FIFA also ordered the IFA to adopt a mandatory anti-discrimination prevention plan and to display "Football Unites the World, No to Discrimination" banners during upcoming matches.
The IDF's statement went further than a simple denial. It released the full names of the eleven individuals and said an intelligence assessment had confirmed their organizational affiliations and operational roles within Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The named individuals include Mohammed Mohammed Hassan Barakat, Mahmoud Kamal Mohammad Ali Al-Rifi, Mohammed Mansour, Ahmed Mohammed Hassan Abu Al-Atta, Abdullah Riyadh Abdullah Khattab, Ali Mahmoud Ahmed Al-Kurd, Mohammad Emad Ata Hussouna, Tariq Ziad Hussein Al-Hour, Mohammed Ziad Hussein Al-Hour, Mahmoud Osama Al-Jazzar, and Mohammad Nidal Mohammed Al-Hawajri.
The IDF did not specify which three participated in the October 7 attack, nor did it detail the specific operational roles each individual held. Fox News Digital reached out to the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations for comment. No response was noted.
The IDF's language left little ambiguity about its view of the broader information campaign:
"In light of these claims, the IDF is now revealing the identities of Palestinian soccer players, referees, and coaches who were presented as athletes and innocent civilians, but who in fact served as terrorists in the military wings of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, and were struck and eliminated by the IDF during the war."
The military added that the pattern extended well beyond soccer. It described a broader effort in which Palestinians killed by IDF operations were presented internationally as journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and other civilian professionals, with their alleged involvement in armed groups deliberately concealed to build a false narrative of targeted civilian killings.
Jibril Rajoub has made Israel's expulsion from international soccer a central cause. He repeatedly cited the death toll among Palestinian athletes and the leveling of sports infrastructure in Gaza as evidence that Israel should face the same treatment FIFA imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. The campaign reached a peak at recent FIFA Congresses, where the PFA pushed hard for a suspension vote.
At the 76th FIFA Congress in Vancouver on April 30, 2026, FIFA President Gianni Infantino was photographed shaking hands with IFA Vice President Basim Sheikh Suliman, a public signal that the governing body was not prepared to isolate Israel. Rajoub was also present at the congress.
FIFA's decision to fine the IFA rather than suspend it drew sharp reactions. But the fine itself underscored a separate problem: the IFA's own anti-discrimination record was poor enough to warrant a six-figure penalty and a mandatory corrective plan. FIFA did not elaborate publicly on the specific breaches.
The IDF framed its disclosure as part of a recurring problem. Throughout the war, international organizations and media outlets have reported civilian casualty figures that include individuals the IDF says were active combatants. The military's statement accused unnamed actors of deliberately promoting false narratives by presenting armed operatives as ordinary professionals.
"The false campaign portraying the IDF as deliberately targeting members of the soccer community, which was created as part of a broader effort promoted by various actors against the State of Israel, accompanies other false narratives advanced throughout the war."
The IDF's claims are its own. No independent verification of the eleven individuals' alleged terror affiliations appeared in the reporting. The intelligence assessment the IDF cited has not been made public. And the PFA's figure of roughly 1,009 athletic community members killed, a staggering number, has not been independently audited either.
What is verifiable is the pattern itself. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have long embedded operatives in civilian institutions across Gaza, from hospitals and schools to media organizations. The IDF's assertion that soccer clubs served the same dual purpose fits a well-documented playbook, one that makes civilian casualty counts inherently difficult to parse and easy to weaponize politically.
FIFA's resolution, a fine, a banner, and a prevention plan, split the difference in a way that left the underlying dispute unresolved. The PFA did not get its suspension. Israel did not get a clean bill of health. And the question of how many of the reported athlete deaths involved actual combatants remains unanswered.
For Rajoub and the PFA, the campaign will almost certainly continue. The death toll figure gives them a powerful talking point on the international stage, regardless of how many names on the list belong to people who also carried weapons or planned operations. For the IDF, the disclosure of eleven names is a start, but without public evidence backing each claim, skeptics will treat it as counter-messaging rather than proof.
The harder question is one FIFA, the IOC, and every international body adjudicating the conflict would rather not answer: when a terrorist organization deliberately blurs the line between combatant and civilian, who bears responsibility for the confusion that follows? The IDF says it knows. The PFA says it knows. And eleven names sit at the center of a dispute that soccer's governing body has neither the tools nor the appetite to resolve.
When armed groups hide behind civilian titles, the people who pay the highest price are the actual civilians left with no one to trust and nowhere safe to play.
