Earlier this month a group of Palestinian boys turned out to train at their local football pitch in the shadow of the wall separating Israel from the West Bank's Aida refugee camp -- and found a note at the gate.
The children took the ominous message from Israeli authorities to Muhannad Abu Srour, sports director at the Aida Youth Center in the camp near Bethlehem, and the news was not good.
"We were shocked to discover that it was a decision to demolish Aida camp's football field," Abu Srour told AFP, adding that more than 500 children regularly train on the field roughly half the size of a regulation soccer pitch.
"The football field is the only open space we have. If the field is taken away, the children's dream is taken away," Abu Srour said.
The planned destruction of the Aida field is one of many points of contention in the occupied West Bank, but it is a particularly painful one for young Palestinians yearning for a better future.
One of the older members, 18-year-old Abdallah al-Ansurur, hopes to make it into the national Palestinian team, and, like many other youth at Aida camp, took his first steps in the game on the pitch flanked by the eight-meter concrete Israeli wall.
"I started when I was about 13 years old. This field gave me a real opportunity to train," said Ansurur, who was born and raised in Aida camp, one of the smallest in the West Bank.
Ansurur, who trains to be a goalkeeper, calls the astroturf-covered piece of land a "lifeline".
"Without this field, I wouldn't have had this chance. If it didn't exist, we'd be playing in the streets -- or not playing at all," he said.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and frequently demolishes Palestinian homes or infrastructure, arguing they were built without permits.
AFP was shown the note from COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs, which says the field was not authorized.
But Anton Salman, who was mayor of adjacent Bethlehem when the field was built in 2021, told AFP the construction was legal.
Salman said his municipality leased the land from the Armenian Church authorities to whom it belongs, before allowing Aida camp's popular committee to manage it for the benefit of residents.
Saeed al-Azzeh, head of the popular committee, confirmed the information, calling the space, "the only breathing space" for camp residents.
"Today, more than 7,000 people live on the same piece of land. Streets are narrow, alleys are cramped -- there is nowhere else," Azzeh said, referring to the camp.
Like other Palestinian refugee camps, Aida was built to accommodate some of the hundreds of thousands of people who either fled their homes or were forced out during the creation of Israel in 1948.
With time, tents gave way to concrete buildings, with the football field representing one of the few open spaces in the camp's dense patchwork.
Abu Srour is proud of what came out of the field, with youth sports delegations able to travel abroad to play, a welcome escape from the West Bank's myriad restrictions.
This is because checkpoints, a fixture of the West Bank since the start of Israel's occupation, have multiplied since the start of the war in Gaza.
Abu Srour mentioned that bringing a local team to Ramallah, a city 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) away as the crow flies, took six hours recently, instead of one hour in the past.
Restricted mobility is a major issue for most Palestinian athletes as it makes it nearly impossible for athletes of similar levels from different cities to train together.
Waseem Abu Sal, who was the first Palestinian boxer to participate in the Olympics, told AFP he frequently sparred with athletes of different levels or weight categories for lack of mobility.
Taking a short break from running a practice for 50 excited five- to 10-year-old boys, coach Mahmud Jandia told AFP he hoped the field would remain.
"Yes, the wall is there -- it feels like a prison -- but despite that, the most important thing is that the field remains and the children keep playing."
"If the field is demolished, all the children's dreams will be demolished with it."
