A Basket, A Cure: How Basketball Brings Life Back to the Gaza Envelope
Barak Peleg, former coach of Hapoel Galil Elyon, took charge of the Otef Darom basketball club to help residents of the Gaza envelope recover after the events of October 7. The project has become a symbol of renewal.
The winding roads suddenly awaken. In the late night hours, when darkness embraces everything, only slightly disturbed by moonlight and road lighting near a random intersection, when many minutes pass without a car passing you — that is when it happens. Suddenly, vapors emerge from the asphalt, from the spaces on the sides of the roads, starting at a low height and curling upward, underground currents waking from their sleep, circling like ghosts whistling spells through the open car window, becoming thicker, obscuring the field of vision. The mists of the Western Negev. Such was the night in early spring 2024, half a year after the 'October sacrifice', the night Barak Peleg arrived in the 'Otef' (the Gaza envelope), and these were the ghosts that greeted him.
'I arrived at the saddest place in the world, the heaviest,' he recalls. 'Evacuated kibbutzim and moshavim, houses empty of people and life. Time that froze. Milk left in the refrigerator since that Saturday. It's terrible. In the end, this is a home. And in a home, there is life. And you pass house after house — and there is no life in them.'
