Spanish football manager Pep Guardiola has welcomed 28 Palestinian children affected by the Israeli genocide in Gaza to his summer football camp in the Catalan Pyrenees town of Rialp, giving them days of training, play and ordinary childhood moments alongside hundreds of other young participants.
The children joined the sixth edition of the Pep Summer Camp, organised under the Guardiola Sala Foundation, as part of its regular sessions this year.
The idea took shape in January, when a young Palestinian resident of Barcelona reached out to camp organisers. He hoped to turn the dream of roughly thirty children into reality: meeting Guardiola, a coach widely admired in Palestinian communities for his public statements on the war in Gaza.
The children arrived in Barcelona the previous Saturday and joined regular camp activities as ordinary participants. To help them integrate, organizers distributed them across different training groups in pairs, supported by five monitors who also worked as interpreters.
Guardiola himself visited the camp, spending time smiling and interacting with the group. The broader program has drawn more than 700 children across its shifts at the Hotel Condes del Pallars facilities.
Alongside football sessions, the camp includes educational talks aimed at broadening the participants’ perspectives. This year’s guests have included figures who work with vulnerable youth and a specialist lawyer discussing online responsibility and sportsmanship.
Laura Guerra, director of the Guardiola Sala Foundation, emphasized the value of exposing participants to different realities.
Organizers described the Palestinian children’s participation as a source of pride and said that the experience could be repeated in future editions.
The gesture builds on Guardiola’s earlier comments on Gaza. At a January 2026 charity event in Barcelona, the Manchester City manager spoke emotionally about Palestinian children, saying that the world had “left them alone, abandoned”, urging people not to look away.
