On the very northern edge of Bethlehem, construction of the pitch began in 2020 with the aim of providing a place to practise football for more than 200 young players from the nearby Aida refugee camp.<\/p>\n
The cramped and crowded streets contain the homes of the descendants of Palestinian families who were forced or who fled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.<\/p>\n
On 3 November last year, as the children made their short walk from the camp for that day’s training, they found a notice pinned to the gate of the football field declaring it to be illegal.<\/p>\n
The notice was followed by a demolition order, issued at the end of December.<\/p>\n
“We don’t have anywhere else to play, 10-year-old Naya told me, wearing a Brazil shirt with the name of the footballing legend Neymar emblazoned on the back.<\/p>\n
“We are building our dreams here,” she said. “If they demolish our field, they will demolish our dreams.”<\/p>\n
I asked another young player, Mohammed, what his reaction was when he heard the news that the club was earmarked for destruction.<\/p>\n
“I was upset,” he told me. “This is a field I really care for.”<\/p>\n
The community fought back, posting videos on social media, launching a petition attracting hundreds of thousands of signatures as well as the reported interventions of senior officials from some of football’s global and regional governing bodies.<\/p>\n
In its latest statement, the Israeli military repeated its claim that the football pitch, built so close to the wall, posed a security issue.<\/p>\n
But the BBC understands that a political decision has been made to postpone the demolition order “for the time being”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the very northern edge of Bethlehem, construction of the pitch began in 2020 with the aim of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154],"class_list":{"0":"post-92896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-bethlehem","9":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","10":"tag-bethlehem-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}