Organized football resumed in Gaza on Friday following a three-year suspension caused by the war, though the return is marred by catastrophic losses: hundreds from the football community have been killed and the vast majority of sports infrastructure has been destroyed.
With the opening whistle of the first match of the "Cup of the Thousand Martyrs" tournament, football resumed in the war-torn enclave.
Gaza's sporting community has suffered heavy losses. Around 565 members of the Palestinian Football Association were killed during the war, while the overall death toll across the Palestinian sports community exceeded 1,000.
"We face many obstacles. As you can see, we are playing on a five-a-side pitch because all sports facilities in the southern governorates were destroyed by the Israeli occupation," said Sami Abu Al-Hussein, assistant secretary-general of the Palestinian Football Association.
Israel destroyed more than 50 of Gaza's 56 sports clubs and 285 sports facilities during the war, leaving few places for players to train or compete.
"This match, after three years of war, sends a powerful message that we are a people who love life, through sport and other aspects of life. We are a people who want to live, and this is the message we want to send to the world through sport," said Raji Ashour, a coach with Shabab Rafah Club.
With Gaza's stadiums in ruins, local clubs have been reduced to playing on small five-a-side pitches, but the game -- however diminished in scale -- has found a way to restart.
Football returns to war-torn Gaza after three years of suspension
The International Deep Space Exploration (Tiandu) Conference run from Thurday from Friday in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province, where Chinese commercial space companies laid out their plans for expanding lunar activity.
At the event, firms presented lunar ambitions ranging from rovers and robotics to rockets and visions for long-term human stays, marking what Wu Weiren, director of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory and a Chinese academician, called "the age of commercial lunar exploration" in his opening keynote speech.
Among the active players, Galactic Energy celebrated the successful maiden flight of its medium-lift liquid rocket PALLAS-1 on Tuesday and is now preparing the larger PALLAS-2 for potential lunar and deep-space missions. Xia Dongkun, the company's executive president, said the goal is to access rare earth elements and other resources on the Moon and asteroids, which are far more abundant than on Earth.
Guangzhou-based CAS Space also shared footage of its Kinastra-1 upper stage, which is set to carry out the company's first lunar mission. The stage is expected to place a satellite into a trans-lunar transfer trajectory in the first quarter of 2027.
"Building on the successful maiden-flight verification, we will focus on advancing a three-step plan for deep-space applications -- helping unlock the trillion-yuan value of the space economy," said Zhu Qinglin, deputy chief designer of the Kinastra-1 upper stage.
Beyond technology demonstrations, the conference was aimed to lay the groundwork for sustainable and inclusive deep space exploration. Organizers announced that the China-led Cislunar CubeSat Constellation (C3) Program will be open to scientists and institutions worldwide, giving developing countries opportunities to participate in deep-space missions.
"It gets busier. We have more actors. It's more accessible in that sense, which is a good thing. But it's maybe for the first time in human history that we are trying to get to the moon with some mechanism already in place -- these principles for everyone's benefit and go there. With those principles very well understood, so that it can be, in a way or another, sustainable for the future," said Ulpia-Elena Botezatu, co-chair of UN-COPUOS Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation.
Chinese commercial space companies aim high for expanding lunar activity at Hefei conference
