This article is partly taken from the summer 2026 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

Lajee Celtic is perhaps the only football academy in the world that trains under the direct gaze of an occupying army. Located in Aida, a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the West Bank, the club’s pitch is surrounded by murals: one depicts a man in a keffiyeh holding the Palestinian flag, another replicates a famous photograph of a young boy, Faris Odeh, throwing a stone at an Israeli tank. “At the front of the camp, there is a huge military base with watchtowers and security cameras. Our lives are controlled by these snipers, and many people have been shot by them, often without any reason,” says Mohammad Al-Azza, director of the Lajee Centre and one of the club’s founding members, who was himself shot in the face while filming from his office window in 2013.

The Israeli army makes regular incursions into the camp, which have become more frequent and more violent in the three years since the genocide began. After one of these raids, a month ago, the team had to spend hours cleaning the pitch before they could start practising. “We found around 150 teargas bombs,” says 16-year-old Majd Hameda, who plays for the second team. “Even after cleaning them away, you’ve still got bad smells, and chemical substances that [can cause] cancer.” Challenges like these mean that playing football isn’t always possible, but Lajee Celtic is determined to keep training. “We want to be as prepared as possible for when we have the opportunity to take part in different tournaments and leagues,” says Hameda.

The club was born out of a longstanding relationship between the Lajee Centre and the Green Brigade, a Celtic FC ultras group based in Glasgow known for its left-wing politics and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In 2016, a Champions League match took place between Celtic (the Scottish side) and the Israeli football team Hapoel Be’er Sheva. Before the game, the Lajee Centre sent thousands of Palestinian flags to the Green Brigade, which their members raised during the match. Celtic were fined €10,000 (£8,500) by Uefa for the gesture; in response, the Green Brigade launched a fundraising campaign for Palestinian charities.They ended up raising over £172,000, a sum they split evenly between two organisations: Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Lajee Centre, who used it to establish a permanent football team. Originally called Aida Celtic, it was later renamed Lajee Celtic so that it was open to all Palestinians, and particularly refugees, not just residents of Aida. It now has a first team for players aged 18 and over, a second team (ages 12-17) and a children’s team.

As with any communal activity among Palestinians, football carries a political significance in the West Bank. For Hamada Banat, a defender on the first team who lives at a different refugee camp, the sport is a universal language through which he can express his identity. Banat had always loved football, but was kept away from this passion for the duration of a four-year sentence in an Israeli prison. “When I got out, coming back to this sport that I loved so much was a way to reconnect with my peers and society,” he says.

“Football is an opportunity to exercise my passion, but also to deliver a message about where I am from”

At the heart of Lajee Celtic is the political struggle of Palestinian refugees, who have been displaced since the Nakba in 1948, when around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and successive waves of forced displacement. (Lajee means “refugee” in Arabic.) This is what first drew Hameda to get involved with the club; he’d played for a few youth teams in the West Bank before, but never had the right to express himself or talk about his experiences as a refugee. “I come from a family of football players, but my father and uncles couldn’t continue with the game because they were imprisoned many times by the Israeli occupation,” he says. “Football is an opportunity to exercise my passion, but also to deliver a message about where I am from and being proud as a Palestinian refugee. That’s at the core of the academy.”

Rami Masalma, a coach at Lajee Celtic who previously played for the Palestine national team, sees football as a way for Palestinians to assert their humanity on a global level. “It’s important for me to show the world that as Palestinians, we are also part of the world, and like anyone else, we love to come together around this game,” he says. “Despite the occupation, we still have the same passions. We can’t just be reduced to a single cause.”

Samir Al-Amir, a co-ordinator at the club who helped found the Lajee Centre, was imprisoned for 19 years for his involvement in the second intifada (an uprising against Israel in 2000). “When I was released [in 2022], I found that my dream had become reality and the centre was very active,” he says. “Right away, I requested to work at Lajee Celtic because I felt I could bring something to the table and make that dream even bigger.”

“Like anyone else, Palestinians love to come together around this game. We can’t be reduced to a single cause”

Administrative detention – a system whereby the Israeli state has effectively unlimited power to imprison Palestinians without charge or trial for six-month periods, which can be renewed indefinitely – has had a profound impact on Lajee Celtic, as it has done for most Palestinians in the West Bank. “Anyone can get arrested,” says Al-Azza. “You don’t need to be part of the armed resistance. You could be arrested as a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker, or if you take part in a protest or write a statement on social media.” When Palestinians are granted a trial, they are tried in the Israeli military court system, which has an approximately 96 per cent conviction rate, largely based on “confessions” extracted under torture and duress, according to human rights group B’Tselem.

One of the team’s coaches was recently freed after 24 months in prison, and several members were arrested in police crackdowns following the attacks of October 7, 2023. A player on the junior team – aged just 16 – has been detained for the last two years. In the West Bank today, stories like this are common: 351 Palestinian minors are currently in Israeli prisons or detention centres, over half of them held without charge. According to a recent report by human rights group Defense for Children International-Palestine, these children routinely face “appalling and debilitating conditions”, including torture.

Alongside the ever-present threat of unlawful imprisonment, the restrictions on movement that Israel has imposed on the West Bank make it hard to run a football club, which by its nature involves travelling to play other teams. These restrictions have worsened since the genocide began, with thousands more checkpoints and other military barriers erected in the region. Travelling between the divided zones and cantons, says Banat, is “as hard as it is to go from one prison cell to another”. His home is just over ten miles from Aida, but the journey can take as long as two and a half hours, and the army closes the checkpoints whenever they want, which often leaves him stranded overnight.

The Palestine football league has been suspended indefinitely since October 2023, which means that Lajee has fewer opportunities than it once did to play against other teams. But whenever they do travel to a match, they risk being dragged off the bus, interrogated and beaten. Those who have previously been detained or imprisoned are more likely to be targeted; Al-Amir, for instance, has been stopped at checkpoints around 50 times since his release. “I have been hit very hard on many occasions, and that applies to the majority of the players,” he says. As these interrogations are carried out, the rest of the team are left waiting on the bus, often for so long that they miss whatever match or training session they were travelling for.

Despite these challenges, Lajee Celtic is determined to create “as safe a place as we can for the youth”, as Al-Azza puts it. He hopes the club will one day have the opportunity to travel abroad and spread their message: advocating for equal rights, including the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, and for the end of oppression not just in Palestine but everywhere. “It’s important to continue with that. Even since this genocide began, we have lost [hundreds of] great football players in Gaza, and some in the West Bank. Some of those players, I’m sure, would have had the opportunity to represent Palestine around the world as part of the national team. But one decision from the coloniser changed that.” Lajee Celtic is one way of honouring their legacy.

The club is also a means of surviving, holding on to hope and finding some pleasure in an environment designed to be as suffocating as possible. “We cannot divide our daily reality from the sports we enjoy,” says Banat. “It is a very harsh oppression that [threatens to] extinguish our dreams for life, and might even cause us to lose some of our humanity, which is expressed through our hobbies and passions.” 

For Al-Azza, giving up is not an option, no matter how extreme the obstacles become. “We have to focus on doing what we want to do, despite everything that is happening,” he says. “There’s always something happening in Palestine. Maybe we can train tomorrow, maybe next month we can’t. So why not keep going?”

You can buy a Lajee Celtic t-shirt via the team’s official website, or their official shop