The scoreboard said 12-0. Nobody on Palestine’s baseball team seemed to care.
The Philippines blanked Palestine in the latter’s Asian Games baseball debut, a lopsided result by any normal measure. But for a country that has endured war in Gaza since October 2023, simply fielding a team in Aichi-Nagoya was its own kind of victory. “With everything that’s going on, what we are trying to do is bring hope to people who do not have a lot of it,” said team leader Oney Roberto Guillen Cardenas. “Just by us being out there on the same stage as countries like Japan … that’s a win in itself.”
Hasan Ammar, who recorded the team’s first hit of the tournament, put it in even starker terms. “This is probably the greatest honor of my life, playing for something so meaningful and on such a big stage,” he said. “You know, two of our teammates were killed in Gaza, and we’re playing for them, and we’re playing for all the people over there.”
The human spirit is resilient that way. And on Monday, a team of survivors took the field in Aichi-Nagoya and sent a message of defiance and hope.
Palestine’s Heartbreaking Fate
That loss isn’t an abstraction. Since October 2023, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to figures reported by the territory’s Ministry of Health, with child fatalities alone exceeding 21,000. Roughly 1.9 million people, close to 85 percent of Gaza’s population, have been displaced, many repeatedly, cycling through overcrowded shelters with failing sanitation as another winter approaches. A ceasefire announced in October 2025 has slowed the violence but not ended it entirely; the UN has continued documenting fatalities and injuries in the months since, alongside ongoing displacement and settler violence in the West Bank. Infrastructure damage across Gaza has been estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, touching housing, hospitals, schools, and farmland alike.
Putting in bluntly, Palestine is suffering. Civilians are being slaughtered. Kids are getting killed. Innocents are being maimed. And the world is sitting back and just watching, seemingly doing nothing.
Against that backdrop, a baseball score stops being the point. For a delegation representing a population living through exactly that kind of loss, walking onto the same field as Japan, competing under the same lights, and being seen by an international audience carries weight no scoreboard can capture.
Palestine will lose plenty of games this tournament, probably by comparable margins. But for players carrying teammates and countrymen with them onto the field, the real contest was never really about the final score. It was about showing up at all.
Yes, showing up matters—especially when giving up is the easier, more convenient option.
