News- Middle East: Abdullah bin Mahmoud al-Ghalban, a professional boxer who once believed his fighting spirit could carry the Gaza Strip’s hopes all the way to the Olympics, has been martyred in an Israeli airstrike against the war-battered coastal sliver.

Palestinian outlets reported his martyrdom on Monday without specifying the precise time and location.

With his untimely demise, Ghalban joined the roughly 800-strong Palestinian athletes who have been killed throughout the Israeli regime’s October 2023-present war of genocide on Gaza.

The warfare has so far claimed the lives of nearly 58,400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, under the elusive pretext of “eliminating” Gaza’s Hamas resistance movement.

The objective has, throughout the brutal military onslaught, consistently evaded Tel Aviv, prompting it to launch even more indiscriminate strikes against Gaza’s civilians, who have been crammed across limited areas after fleeing the war elsewhere in the territory.

The outlets, meanwhile, offered a harrowing account of how Ghalban’s athletic stardom dreams ended up buried under the rubble that had already reportedly trapped thousands of others with no clear hope of survival.

Ghalban started boxing in 2019, training at the humble al-Nasr al-Arabi Club in Gaza.

Soon, he began dazzling crowds beyond the Palestinian territories, clinching a gold medal and being crowned the best player at an Asian championship -- a victory that made history for the Palestinian nation.

Abdullah, who once used to dream of the Paris Olympics, however, had his dreams choked up by the current war as the aggression forced the club to convert into a displaced persons’ shelter, and compelled him to start helping others, delivering relief, and selling small goods on battered sidewalks for survival.

An aerial assault then took away his brother, whom he used to hail as a tower of strength that he would lean upon.

Despite having adversity after adversity piled up on him, the trailblazing athlete would tell various news outlets before his martyrdom that he would keep powering through even as the rings had crumbled, and even as the people who used to push him forward had been buried.

Fellow athletes and his fan base have described his quest as one aimed at showing the world that Palestinians were more than rubble and funeral processions heaped upon them by Israeli brutality.

Source: Press TV