The Palestine Football Team has withdrawn from the Merdeka Cup 2023. This follows Hamas’s raids into Israel on Saturday morning. Due to the closure of all border crossings and Lod Airport due to the Israel-Palestine war, travel is impossible. The Palestine Football Association has informed that there will be no matches this week due to the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.
On Saturday morning, Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza, led mostly by Hamas, declared a full-scale military offensive into the neighbourhoods. It even includes settlements close to the Gaza-Israel border.
The situation marked an unprecedented infiltration into Israel by an unknown number of Hamas fighters entering from Gaza. It is Israel’s most serious blow in the conflict with the Palestinians. Since the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada two decades ago.
The Israeli military said that its retaliation operations on Gaza on Sunday struck 426 targets, destroying houses in tremendous explosions. This included a 14-story building in downtown Gaza City, which contained dozens of apartments as well as Hamas offices.
The Merdeka Cup 2023 was planned to include four teams, with Palestine playing Tajikistan in the first game. Lebanon was supposed to play Palestine, but the team withdrew. Palestine was the top seed in the league, ranking 96th in the current FIFA football rankings, followed by India (102nd), Tajikistan (110th), and Malaysia (136th).
The Merdeka Cup, also known as Pestabola Merdeka, originated in 1957 as a friendly international football match to mark the country’s independence day. In contrast, the competition, which was last held in 2013, is making a ten-year comeback.
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