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LEBANON WAR

Lebanese footballer Céline Haydar in critical condition following Israeli strike on Chiyah

Haydar was walking in the streets of the neighborhood she and her family had been forced to flee when a bomb struck nearby. A falling stone put her in a coma that she has yet to wake up from.

Lebanese footballer Céline Haydar in critical condition following Israeli strike on Chiyah

Photo of footballer Sarah Haydar circulating on social networks since Saturday.

Céline Haydar, a midfielder for the Lebanese women's national football team, was seriously injured by an Israeli strike on Saturday against Chiyah, in Beirut’s southern suburbs. A piece of stone hit her in the head, requiring an operation on her skull, according to a friend of Haydar and a source at Saint Georges Hospital in Hadath.

Following the surgery, the 24-year-old was transferred to Saint Georges Orthodox Hospital in Achrafieh, where she is still receiving intensive care and remains, on Monday, in “critical condition.”

At her bedside on Monday was Nour Ghadban, Haydar’s former manager when she played for Safa in the women's first division. She said that her friend and football player had arrived to the hospital in a coma and still hadn’t woken up. Just the evening before the strike, Ghadban and Haydar had been playing football together.

Brain damage and appeal for donations

‘The aim of this first operation was to stop the bleeding,” Ghadban explained, “because there was hemorrhaging inside and out due to a fracture in the skull. There is a lot of damage to the brain and she has been in a coma ever since she was taken to hospital. She is still in a critical condition.”

Photo taken from Céline Haydar's Instagram account.

Haydar and her family had left their home in Chiyah several weeks ago, fleeing the intensified Israeli bombardment of the neighborhood, but on Saturday, Haydar was walking in the street, near the home she had left, Ghadban explains, when an Israeli jet dropped a bomb nearby, the blast causing a stone to break off from a building overhead and fall on Haydar’s head.

The medical costs associated with her treatment in the hospital will be covered by the Ministry of Health, Ghadban says, while several of her friends have launched an appeal for donations on social media with the permission of her parents to fund her rehabilitation, the details of which are listed below.

Chiyah was hit during a series of air raids on the southern suburbs of Beirut shortly before midday, according to a National News Agency (NNA) report published at 12:01 p.m., less than half an hour after the Israeli army's Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted an evacuation warning online concerning a building near the Husseinieh in Chiyah.

‘One of the most intelligent players’

Playing as a midfielder, Haydar is a member of the Beirut Football Academy (BFA) team, with whom she won the Lebanese women's championship last season. In an interview with LBCI, her former national team coach Joanna Hamzeh described Haydar as one of the “most intelligent players,” well liked by her team-mates. The news of her injury in the strike spread widely online, the tragedy mourned especially within the Lebanese football community.

Lebanese football has already paid a heavy price in the war between Hezbollah and Israel, particularly since the start of the Israeli escalation on Sept. 23, following a year-long war of attrition between the two sides.

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One of the hardest-hit clubs is Baalbeck’s Tajamo' Shabab, which lost its captain Malek Moussawi on Oct. 25 in an Israeli bombing of the town of Nabi Sheet in the Bekaa, which also killed team photographer Ahmad Amouri. Another former captain of the Bekaa team, Mustafa Gharib, was also killed in another Israeli attack on the outskirts of Baalbeck in March 2024.

The goalkeeper of Safa's youth team, Ali Farhat, was also killed on Oct. 28. Another player in Ansar's youth section, Jalal Kassab, survived an Israeli bombardment that wounded him in the face while he was in his home in Bourj al-Shamali, near Sour.

In all, at least six players from football clubs have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon. According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health, 3,481 people have been killed and 14,786 injured since Oct. 8, 2023.

Céline Haydar, a midfielder for the Lebanese women's national football team, was seriously injured by an Israeli strike on Saturday against Chiyah, in Beirut’s southern suburbs. A piece of stone hit her in the head, requiring an operation on her skull, according to a friend of Haydar and a source at Saint Georges Hospital in Hadath.Following the surgery, the 24-year-old was transferred to...