GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — In an attempt to fight a patriarchal society that keeps hindering their progress in most of the fields they aspire to, Palestinian women are breaking with customs and traditions in a bid to prove that just like men, they have scientific capabilities and technical skills. This was the main incentive that led the Palestinian association of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to allow female first-aid workers to cover the ongoing football Premier League for the first time,  in a move to challenge society's perception of women's work in general and female first-aid workers in particular.

In this context, the chairman of the board of the Palestinian Association of EMS in the Gaza Strip, Abbas al-Harazin, told Al-Monitor, “We got the idea from the female first-aid workers’ coverage of the Women's World Cup under the age of 17, which was held Sept. 30 at the Jordan university of science and technology, and we executed it out of our belief in the ability of female first-aid workers to deal with all kinds of cases.”

Asked how the idea was executed, ​​Harazin said that the Palestinian Football Association asked the EMS association to provide medical assistance in the Premier League matches in the event players get injured. But the association did not specify the gender of the workers it wanted, thinking that these would be males as per usual.

The football association initially refused the idea, and Harazin said, “The rejection was based on the Palestinian conservative traditions whereby such work would be inappropriate for women and male rescuers should be given priority. However, we managed to convince the association of the idea, and we asked it to give the girls a chance to assess their skills accordingly. The experience started at the end of October.”