Israel detains Palestine international women’s football player
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
Rand Halawani’s detention also saw four other women arrested on Tuesday, including a former Palestine player.
Israeli authorities have extended the detention of a player on the Palestinian women’s national football team after she was summoned for questioning in Jerusalem, Palestinian officials have reported.
The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) denounced the prolonged detention of 20-year-old Rand Halawani, who was arrested on Tuesday evening.
In a statement, it said Halawani’s arrest and that of a former national team player were “not an isolated incident, it is part of a well-documented pattern of systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes, which continues without accountability”.
According to the Palestinian governorate for Jerusalem, an Israeli court on Wednesday extended Halawani’s detention until Friday.
Israel’s military also arrested former national football player Natalie Abu Diyeh, a student at Birzeit University, as well as three other young Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday.
The military said in a statement that the four women were suspected of “promoting terrorist activities and additional terrorist-related activities”.
Birzeit University denounced the arrests as part of Israel’s “systematic policies targeting Palestinian education and students’ right to continue their academic journey”.
Bishop Imad Haddad of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, to which Natalie Abu Diyeh belonged, called for her release.
“We are deeply shocked and horrified by this news, as well as by the news that her family does not yet know where she has been taken”, Haddad said in a statement on Tuesday.
According to the Prisoners Club, the main association for prisoners’ rights in the Palestinian territories, 89 Palestinian women are currently in Israeli jails, including three minors and three pregnant women.
The Palestinian Authority-affiliated Prisoners Club announced in late May that more than 9,400 Palestinians were in Israeli jails, including Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Reference Link:- https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/6/3/israel-detains-palestine-international-football-player
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
