Mohammed Rashid: World Cup qualifiers will show the whole world Palestine exists

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Every morning, when Mohammed Rashid wakes, the first thing he does is message his friends back in Gaza.

“This is what I always try,” Rashid, the experienced Palestine national team midfielder, tells The National moments before he, somehow, switches focus to prepare for Thursday’s 2026 World Cup qualification opener in Sharjah.

“As soon as I wake up, I'll send a message, ‘How are you doing today? How are you doing today?’ Every couple days, I get a text from them saying, ‘OK, I'm alive’, or, ‘I'm OK’.

“Just to know they're still alive is a blessing because apparently from what I understood from one of the guys, they just don't know what's going to happen. Everything's a surprise.

“But my family, my parents, my brother, my younger brothers, one of my older sisters, they're all good. They live in Ramallah; it’s a little far from what's happening in Gaza.”

Rashid, who since last summer plies his club trade for Bali United in Indonesia and therefore represents one of 10 players in the current squad playing outside of Palestine, may be far enough physically from the devastation in his homeland.

But, understandably, it is never not at the forefront of his mind.

“The first week, honestly, even my wife was telling me, ‘You need to let go a little bit on the phone because I wasn’t sleeping,” Rashid says. “It was really tough. Training was very rough for me the first week.

“Slowly you need to know how to work and manage what you're seeing, to be able to function in your normal life.

“Even then, it's still hard to function, because unintentionally the things still pop up on your phone. Even if you don't want to look at it, you’re going to end up looking at it, and it's horrific.