This year, The Big Ride for Palestine is launching a new fundraising campaign: to support the Gaza Sunbirds, a cycling team from Gaza, and help send them to the Paralympics in 2024!

Exciting Gaza Sunbirds fundraising update:

We are really excited to let you know that our partners at the Amos Trust have been offered some match funding for the Gaza Sunbirds fundraising campaign. This means that any sponsorship money raised for the Gaza Sunbirds through participation in The Big Ride for Palestine and our campaign, will be doubled, up to a total of £10,000. This is exclusively for the Gaza Sunbirds, and is a fantastic opportunity for us to raise an incredibly important amount of money for these inspiring para-cyclists. Let’s get the Gaza Sunbirds the support they need to get to the 2024 Paralympics...

The Big Ride for Palestine is an annual charity bike ride, that uses cycling as a mechanism to inform people and show solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. This year, alongside our ongoing annual support for the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA), we're also teaming up with the Amos Trust to support an incredible cause. We would like to send a cycling team from Gaza to the Paralympics in France in 2024. By becoming backers of the Gaza Sunbird team, you can help us get this project off to a flying start.

The original Gaza Sunbird, Alaa al-Dali, was an Olympic hopeful cyclist when his leg was shot to pieces by an Israeli sniper on 30 March 2018. He was standing alone in his cycling gear, with his bike, as he watched a March of Return demonstration, 250 metres from the separation fence east of Rafah.

“The bullet [was] like a small grenade. It almost disintegrated the bone of my leg, 22cm of it. The muscle, arteries and veins were totally damaged. The doctor said he has never seen anything like it,” Alaa says, “I needed to make a choice; either the amputation or losing my life. After thinking a lot, I gave my consent to cut the leg. It was a very hard decision to make.” Quote taken from an Al Jazeera article.

Read more about Alaa al-Dali and the Gaza Sunbird team here. www.amostrust.org/palestine-justice/ahlan-gaza/gaza-sunbirds/

Set up your JustGiving page and help us support Alaa and the team, and show them we ride in solidarity with them, so that they too can keep riding - often in the most harrowing of circumstances.

We raise, we ride, to free Palestine.