We didn’t make it to the Paralympics, but we still have hope: the Gazan paracyclist
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As part of the Guardian’s Gaza Voices series this year, Hazem Suleiman told of how the roads he trained on had been destroyed. Now, he’s raising money for other amputees. Hazem Suleiman is a member of the Gaza Sunbirds, a paracycling team based in Gaza. A former footballer, he lost a leg as a result of being shot in protests at the Rafah border in 2018. We first spoke to him five months ago as part of our Gaza Voices series on everyday Palestinian life. At that time, Suleiman, who also photographs and documents life in Gaza, was dealing with the toll of displacement from his home in Rafah to the town of Khan Younis.
He and the other Sunbirds had been training hard, hoping to represent Palestine in the 2024 Paralympics in Paris, but after the Israeli assault on Gaza following Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023, they were unable to realise this dream. They did at least achieve their goal – to compete in an international competition for the first time – in May this year: the Para-Cycling Road World Cup, in Belgium and Italy.
Suleiman has been displaced twice since we last spoke. Days after our conversation in July, he fled from western Khan Younis towards Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. He knows precisely how long he and his young family of 10 sheltered near Rafah: 41 days. In late September, they returned to the Khan Younis neighbourhood and put up their blue tent in the same spot.
“When we came back, everything was destroyed. It wasn’t what it used to be before we left. Every now and then, we still hear shelling, or a tent or nearby building is bombed,” he says. He saw the bodies of several friends and neighbours on their return journey.
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