One afternoon in 2019, Yasser Hamed, with a Palestinian surname but originally from Liwa (Bizkaya), received a personal message on Facebook. It was written in Arabic, and with the help of Google Translate, I was able to figure out that it was a call to go to Ramallah in the West Bank. “The first time I went looking for the guy who was writing to me he was actually the selector and then I was able to find out that he was calling me up to play for the national team. Hamed was 22 years old and played in Portugal in the third division.
Yasser’s grandfather left Spain in the 1970s to study medicine. He finished his career and settled in the Basque Country where he met his wife and formed a Basque family in Liwa with five children. “I called my family in Gaza and we said hello to our family but we never came back.” Los Hamed is part of a community of 1,300 Palestinians living in Spain, but Yasser’s role in the selection has made him an idol and well-known ambassador throughout the Arab world. “Last summer we had a vacation in Mallorca with my girlfriend. We went to the beach and when we returned to the hotel there was a big bouquet of flowers in the room. I left it in the kitchen, which is Moroccan, and when I got there I wanted to thank me for what I was doing for Palestine. You are amazing,” Hamed said by phone from Doha, where Al Gharafa, Joselu’s former madridista team, plays.
Since his first trip to Ramallah in 2019, Hamed has never stopped realizing the importance of football for Palestinians. The selection is now being made in Qatar as a location which is one of Palestine’s main diplomatic resources. In his first appearance, he scored a historic goal against Yemen, and in the midst of the conflict with Israel in 2023, he was able to pass the quarter-finals of the Asian Cup for the first time.
Yasser had an idea a few years ago that would eventually fulfill his highest sporting ambitions. “He had always dreamed of playing for San Mamés and taking part in the selection of Euskadi in the independent competitions, so he reached out to the last presidents of the Basque national team, Javier Landeta and Iker Goni, and put him in touch with Palestine. Between the tight calendar and the huge number of problems, I thought it would be very difficult until the phone was turned on this summer. The secret negotiations broke down and finally the success of bringing Palestine to San Mamés was completed,” he explains. Social movements against the Israeli genocide, especially during the Vuelta a España, exposed the contradictions of European professional sport against Israel. Social commitment has become virtually unimaginable with the Euskadi-Palestine conference held on November 15 in Bilbao, which in a few hours sold more than 30,000 online entries for the Basque Federation.
Hamed played in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, India and Qatar. It is the world of football that gives meaning to his career thanks to the power of the ball to give up a just cause. Despite the suffering of the Palestinian village, Yasser is optimistic. “We will play in San Mamés, but we will also play again at home, on the West Bank.” ¿Y in Gaza? “Ujala, but that’s when it’s impossible,” he sums up.
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