Mustafa Ahmad Tafesh moved through life with a big grin and an arsenal of silly jokes that made him easy to like. He loved to make people laugh. The 21-year-old infielder and outfielder for the Palestine National Baseball Team had a magnetic personality and a tendency not to take himself too seriously, which meant that he was constantly the subject of pictures and videos shot on the phones of his friends, family members, classmates and teammates. His uncle, Mahmoud Tafesh, the founder of the team, recalls the family often joking about Mustafa’s poor penmanship. His daughter, who is the same age as Mustafa, took to filling in her cousin’s schoolwork for him. Somehow he still made decent grades.
On Aug. 12, an Israeli airstrike killed Mustafa as he stood outside his home in Sheikh Radwan, Gaza. His death came just three days after an Israeli quadcopter killed soccer star Suleiman Obeid (the “Pele” of Palestinian soccer, as he was known), news that circulated throughout the Western press and social media.
The family’s grief is still as fresh as the day it happened. Mahmoud was out with his wife and kids in Istanbul, where they live, when they got the devastating news. “A dear friend of mine in Egypt saw it online and called me,” Mahmoud told New Lines. “He told me, ‘Your brother’s son has been martyred.’” Despite months of grim developments coming out of Gaza, Mahmoud couldn’t believe the news. “I said, ‘How? I was just speaking with his father the other day. How could he be dead?’” Mahmoud’s wife, Maysa, collapsed in tears, nearly fainting in shock. He called his brother Ahmad, Mustafa’s father and the team’s current president, in Sheikh Radwan to confirm the news. An Israeli missile had struck the family home, where a group of youths were hanging out. Mustafa succumbed to his injuries on the way to the hospital. Ahmad recited the shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith) to his son as he watched him take his last breath, dying in his arms. Mustafa was his youngest child.
For his teammates, the loss — not just of a friend and fellow player, but of someone who embodied the improbable dream of Palestinian baseball — is unbearable.
“The whole team is devastated,” said Nader Ihmoud, a Chicago-based Palestinian-American journalist and editor-in-chief of Palestine in America, who first met Mustafa in 2023. “Even people who never met him in person were touched by him. I wrote that he was a beacon of light because it’s like everywhere he went became brighter.” His personality was so inviting that even newer players who never met him in person developed relationships with him after he added them on social media and began conversations, a habit that made them feel connected as a team despite the dislocation and grief brought on by the genocide in Gaza.
Mustafa’s death is part of a broader assault on civilian life in Gaza under Israel’s nearly two-year-long bombardment, which has killed hundreds of male and female, child and adult Palestinian athletes — along with Palestinians in every other walk of life. In fact, Mustafa was not the first player whom the team had lost. In March 2024, an Israeli drone strike near Al-Shifa Hospital killed the team’s captain, 39-year-old outfielder Ashraf Awad Murad.
“They are killing all of our sons, destroying the future generations of Palestinian athletes. We pray that we will not have to mourn the loss of any more players on Team Palestine,” Mahmoud said.
When Mahmoud announced in 2016 that he wanted to start a Palestinian national baseball team, even those closest to him were somewhat unconvinced. Baseball was still a foreign concept to many in the region. The former national soccer player had encountered the sport while on a recent trip to Egypt and just couldn’t shake the idea of bringing it back to his beloved country. He returned to Gaza, and with nobody around to train him, relied on YouTube videos of American matches to learn the game. Generating a small buzz, he soon secured approval from the Ministry of Youth and Sports and began recruiting players from all over Gaza.
In the age of social media, his work drew international attention. “People in France noticed what I was doing and encouraged me to get my team officially recognized,” he told New Lines. In 2019, he traveled to Japan and attended the World Baseball Softball Confederation Congress, receiving recognition from the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) for the Palestine Baseball and Softball Federation.
At the time, 15-year-old Mustafa was still a budding soccer player who spent much of his time playing in a local soccer club. When he heard about his uncle starting with baseball, he was interested, so Mahmoud took him under his wing, training him “like a small child.” Mustafa ended up enjoying it so much that he started playing both sports. Soon after officially joining the team as its youngest player, he would give up his first love to pursue baseball.
Mahmoud’s persistence continued even during COVID-19, when travel restrictions left him stranded in Turkey. He reached out to international baseball communities to spread the word about Palestine’s emerging team. Eventually, the first opportunity to participate globally came with the West Asia Cup, which was to take place in Pakistan from Jan. 27 through Feb. 1, 2023. The Palestine team brought together five players from Gaza and others from the Palestinian-American diaspora. Steve Sosebee, founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and co-founder and executive director of HEAL Palestine, who had joined Team Palestine’s baseball roster in Pakistan through his Palestinian citizenship, traveled to Gaza to deliver donated equipment, helping support the federation’s fledgling program.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago in 2019, Ihmoud noticed a Facebook post that said Palestine was recruiting players for its national baseball team. “I remember scrolling and thinking, Is this real? Even at the first tryout only six guys showed up.” Despite his initial reservations, Ihmoud knew he had to join the team. Besides his lifelong love of baseball (inspired by his mom getting him involved in the sport early on after seeing some kids playing in the street), he felt that playing for Palestine was an honor in itself. “You want to do as much as you can for your country and you feel like you’re not doing enough, but then you get an opportunity to do something that’s so simple, so easy to do, and that means a lot to a lot of people.”
Four years later, there they were as a team: meeting up for the first time at the Turkish airport en route to the West Asia Cup in Islamabad, where they would be playing Team Palestine’s first baseball game.
The West Asia Cup is not the World Series. But Palestine’s debut at the tournament was historic, the first time the flag was flown at an international baseball tournament. Mahmoud remembers it vividly: “It was the best feeling ever, it was a beautiful feeling that a team from Palestine was participating and representing Palestine on the world stage. … I felt like I had fulfilled my dream.” The team got to play against countries like Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Once there, many of those attending the games openly cheered for them, waving Palestinian flags and calling out “Zindabad [Long live] Palestine!” according to Ihmoud. Children swarmed the players after matches, asking for autographs, and the team members were treated like rock stars. (As the team’s head of communications, Ihmoud does, however, encounter hostile comments on the odd occasion. One YouTube comment asked, “Are they going to throw bombs instead of baseballs?”) Team members recall that the overwhelming reaction was one of encouragement and solidarity, a testament to the team’s ability to inspire across borders, despite the violence raining down on them back home. Against better-funded teams with much longer histories, the Palestinians were underdogs in every sense of the word. And yet, Palestine secured second place after losing to Pakistan in the finals.
Mustafa’s teammate from Chicago, Zaki Haj, remembers meeting him for the first time and quickly taking a liking to the young athlete who would coolly drop lines in the English he had just learned from his teammates. “That was the only tournament that he participated in with us, and that was the only tournament (our players in Palestine) were able to participate with us in. We were fortunate to be able to play with them and to be able to represent the national team with them,” said the 23-year-old pitcher. “It was an amazing time with them in Pakistan: to hold our Palestinian flag and to take pictures with the Palestinian Embassy, that was also a blessing.” He said that he often finds himself looking back at those pictures, wishing that he could go back in time and recapture the sentiment.
“But we can’t go to Pakistan with Mustafa anymore. … We’re always going to feel like something’s missing, knowing that Mustafa will not be able to represent us anymore.”
“The goal is to eventually not have to worry about the guys back home because they have the same equipment, the same access. Right now that’s not the case,” Ihmoud told New Lines. “Mustafa used to always joke and say, like, ‘Oh man, if I had your tools.’” At some point last year he even messaged Ihmoud for advice about crypto investments. “He was just a 20-year-old trying to figure out life, how to make money.”
But Israel’s occupation of Gaza defined his reality. Even in his first trip abroad, this reality intruded upon their dream trip. Mustafa and his fellow Gazans were held in Egypt for five days before being allowed to continue to Islamabad for the tournament. Their return was marked by the same obstacles. “Mustafa was born and raised in Gaza. It’s all he’s known, being in an open-air prison,” Ihmoud said. Still, Mustafa’s dreams of once again representing Palestine remained as potent as ever.
In early 2024, Haj sustained a torn labrum while playing. A few months later, he tore his bicep. While recovering from bicep reconstruction surgery and full labrum repair, doctors found a tumor in his neck. At some point while sitting at home depressed, Haj came to a realization. “It’s crazy, this is just nasib [destiny], everything’s meant to happen for a reason. If I wasn’t playing this game I probably wouldn’t have known anything was going on with my neck.” He said that watching what’s happening back in Gaza helped put things in perspective. “What I’ve gone through, that’s nothing because what they go through right now and what they’ve gone through for the last year and a half, and what they’ve gone through for the last 75 years, I don’t even think I would be able to live that for a week.”
So Haj began virtual training sessions, growing his clients from two to 62 in the first year. Among them was his good-natured teammate. “Mustafa would call me maybe once every two weeks. He’d send me videos, ask mechanical questions. He wasn’t the most talented, but he was the most open-hearted.” About a month ago, Ihmoud and Haj were speaking via FaceTime with Ahmad, the team president, about an upcoming tournament and the future of the under-15 program, when Mustafa joined the call briefly. They talked about the hope of playing together in Gaza and creating local little leagues. It was the last time they spoke with him.
“He was someone who wanted to learn the game, to build and represent the game and to introduce the game to all the people in Palestine,” remembers Haj. “That was what we wanted as a national team. Our mission was to build a field. They already had created a facility, but in the very beginning of the war, Israel destroyed our whole facility. Our batting cages, our field was damaged.”
Though Team Palestine had qualified for the December 2023 Asian Baseball Championship, the outbreak of war in October prevented the Gaza-based players from leaving, forcing them to miss the tournament. They were also unable to participate in the inaugural Arab Classic exhibition in Dubai, as well as the three subsequent tournaments. Earlier this year, however, the American team members traveled to Iran to compete in the West Asia Cup again. Although Ihmoud was unable to attend in person due to work, he streamed the games live and provided play-by-play commentary. The team emerged victorious, marking the first time a Palestinian sports team had won a West Asia regional tournament — an achievement spanning all sports, from baseball to basketball to soccer. It was a remarkable feat for a young team competing against teams that have been playing for decades, made all the more remarkable when one considers the context in which this is all happening.
Israel’s bombardment has obliterated Gaza’s sporting life: Dozens of clubs and major stadiums have been reduced to rubble — from Palestine Stadium to Yarmuk Stadium, to the only baseball and softball field (in al-Shati refugee camp) — erasing the spaces where athletes like Mustafa once played. Of course, beyond the larger hollowing-out of Gaza’s already strained sports infrastructure, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, cafes, shops, office buildings, homes and the lives of those who built them — who learned and played and worked and worshipped and loved and lived in them — have been destroyed one by one.
In spite of all of this, the American members of Team Palestine will soon compete in the 31st Baseball Federation of Asia (BFA) Asian Championship in September in Pingtan, China, marking another significant milestone in their journey on the international stage.
“All of the destruction … this just increases our determination,” Mahmoud said. “Despite the loss of Ashraf and Mustafa, we will play in China and beyond. We will carry the Palestinian flag.”
Haj said that while he and his teammates feel helpless in the face of a genocide against their people, representing Palestine on a global stage has its own value. “We’ve received numerous pictures with kids (in Gaza) that are just keeping up to date, watching all our streams and games. I mean, that tells us something, that the world is watching. So we have a passion, we have a why for why we play now.”
There have been growing calls for international sports bodies to take a stand against the violence in Gaza, with activists urging organizations to suspend or boycott Israeli teams and events. Campaigners argue that continuing sports ties without consequence normalizes the ongoing assault on Palestinian civilians and infrastructure.
“It starts with the commissioners for each sport. Because it was easy for them to say in the very beginning on Oct. 8, ‘We stand with Israel,’” argued Haj. “Every sporting body, professional teams, athletes all came out with a statement or spoke out and said they stand with Israel. It’s as simple as that.” He notes that, while high-profile professional athletes too often are afraid to speak up for fear of losing their corporate sponsorships, there has been a gradual shift in celebrities’ willingness to express condemnation against Israel. One recent example of a sports celebrity breaking their silence in solidarity is Mo Salah’s X post responding to UEFA’s tribute to Obeid, questioning the omission of details surrounding his death by asking, “Can you tell us how he died, where, and why?” The post was met with both praise and criticism from fans who had long questioned his perceived reluctance to speak on the genocide. (Meanwhile, DJ Khaled continues his disappearing act, for those who lost track.)
For Ihmoud, following professional sports in the U.S. has become fraught with tension. While he once attended multiple Chicago Bulls games a year, he now struggles with a “toxic relationship” with sports leagues that largely ignore the ongoing violence in Gaza. Watching these games feels like a reminder of the dissonance between the relative comfort of life in the diaspora and the suffering of those back home. “I’m just like a normal sports fan. I’m emotional and I’m just going to keep going back and forth, back and forth, and, you know, it’s a toxic relationship. (But) if there’s 30 guys on a team, I’m hoping 25 of them are on the right side of history. I’ve been in locker rooms and there’s always going to be like two or three pieces of shit.”
In the days after Mustafa’s killing, the Palestinian Baseball and Softball Federation drafted a letter to the WBSC, urging it to condemn Israel and suspend its membership. “Mustafa Ahmad Abd Tafesh, an infielder and outfielder for our national team, was martyred in an Israeli airstrike near his home in Gaza City,” the letter began. His name was followed by Murad’s and those of younger athletes who never got to leave Gaza.
“Mustafa dreamed of traveling, of representing Palestine,” said his uncle Mahmoud. “He wanted to join the players abroad and raise the flag.” But the dream will not disappear with the loss of Mustafa and Murad. “Though we cry for them, we will continue. We will show the world that baseball is still alive in Palestine. That Palestine is still alive.”
“Everything will be under the name of all our martyrs,” Haj said. “Because that’s who we’re representing and that’s what we play for every single time we go out and play. We go out and play for a free Palestine.”
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.