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Chronicle-Tribune · 31 May 2016

CP-2016-005

U.S. coach’s mission: Promote wheelchair basketball in Gaza

By Fares Akram, Associated Press, Khan Younis

U.S. coach’s mission: Promote wheelchair basketball in Gaza — Chronicle-Tribune, 31 May 2016
Chronicle-Tribune · 31 May 2016

Transcribed from the clipping

“KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — A top U.S. coach is in the Gaza Strip to help set up the territory’s first female wheelchair basketball team. ‘I think for Gaza this is a very unique thing,’ said the trainer, Jess Markt. ‘I think there are not so many opportunities for women to play sports here, and particularly for disabled women.’ Markt, 40, was a track athlete until 21 years ago when he suffered a severed spinal cord in a car accident… The perpetual state of conflict, along with substandard health care, has added to the tens of thousands of disabled Gazans.… On Saturday, 15 women and girls in wheelchairs clustered around Markt, listening to the instructions with smiles on their faces… Mona Khattab, 47, is one of the first female basketball players in Gaza… She said that most basketball courts in Gaza are not designed for wheelchairs, and many courts are open to the sun. The players’ wheelchairs are also heavier than those used by basketball teams overseas. ‘With our will and power we challenge the game using these chairs,’ she said. ‘In the international matches, the chairs are light as air. Here, our arms and muscles are sore.’”

Photograph caption

WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL: A disabled Palestinian woman takes part in a basketball training session held by U.S. coach Jess Markt, left, in the Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip.

Context added by this archive

Fifteen women and girls in a Red Crescent sports hall, an eight-club men’s league already running, and a Paralympic committee trying to form a women’s team in a society where sport can be read as immodest. Mona Khattab is named and quoted. The same wire story ran in another paper the same day under a headline that kept the word female; this one takes it out.

Cite this item

"U.S. coach’s mission: Promote wheelchair basketball in Gaza," Chronicle-Tribune, 31 May 2016. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2016-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2016-005

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2016-005.

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