Application 39: 14 years after a genocide, playwright Ahmed Masoud imagines Gaza as the 2048 Olympic Games host

When your homeland suffers relentless strife, it can be difficult to imagine any kind of future for it.

So found Gaza-born Palestinian author, academic, and playwright Ahmed Masoud, who was tasked in 2018 with writing a short story set in the future for the Palestine +100 anthology.

In response, Ahmed wrote Application 39, conjuring up a concept that left everyone he told about it bewildered – Gaza City as host of the 2048 Olympic Games.

The story, now adapted for the stage, is set in the State of Gaza City in the year 2040, 14 years after a genocide is brought to an end by a ceasefire.

IT department employees Rayan and Salma apply for Gaza to host the Games as a joke, by hacking the International Olympic Committee (IOC) website and copying France’s application.

Relishing the idea that it might catalyse international peace, the IOC awards the Games to Gaza City, a city still in ruins after the genocide.

“Gaza was only being associated with violence, conflict, bombing, rubble… I wanted to create another reality where we are able to imagine Gaza as a city that would be able to host the Olympics,” Ahmed tells The New Arab.

He adds, “The Olympics are about cities more than they are about the countries – London, Paris, other cities – and I thought, why not Gaza City?”

'Look where we are right now'

In Application 39 lies horrible prescience. Ahmed imagined a genocide in Gaza in the year 2025; that Gaza would be divided into states; and that Israel would use robots that would bark orders at Palestinians to show identification.

“Without knowing, I wrote that there would be a genocide happening in 2025. That was back in 2018, and look where we are right now,” Ahmed says.

He continues, “With the robots talking to people – that is happening now, with the quadcopters that go and ask for identification. This has happened to my own family.

“I feel ashamed that I was prophetic about these things.”

Beginning on 26 May, Application 39 has had a week-long run at London’s Theatro Technis, as part of the PalArt festival happening in collaboration with Shubbak, and is being performed to sold-out audiences.

While adapting the short story for theatre, Ahmed wove in stories and events from Gaza that took place after 7 October.

Some of these are deeply personal to Ahmed, who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp – the site of some of Israel’s most rampant destruction during the genocide. 

Although he has been living in the UK since 2002, many of his family members still live in Gaza. He has lost several relatives in the ongoing genocide; two were killed just two weeks ago.

Preserving stories 

In one scene in the play, Rayan (played by Joe Haddad), who was a child when the genocide was happening, recollects carrying a baby for a tired mother across a checkpoint, and the fear he felt about losing her – a retelling of a plight suffered by Ahmed’s sister, who remains in Gaza.

“My sister had to give her baby away to this random guy exactly as in the play, and then she panics because the guy is faster than her across the checkpoint,” Ahmed explains.

Also prominent is the story of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, another Jabalia native whom Ahmed knows personally.

Hussam, the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza, was arrested and detained by Israeli forces in December 2024 after refusing to abandon the facility. Israeli forces besieged and raided the hospital. Six months on, Hussam is being held in Israeli administrative detention, where he has been beaten and tortured while his health declines.

The hospital director’s story has fallen off the radar of most.

“He was a news story at some point, and now he’s been forgotten. But to me, he is a hero, somebody who dedicated his life to his patients and refused to leave the hospital. I knew the man, and how good he was, but he ended up being humiliated and is now imprisoned,” Ahmed says.

“I thought that I needed to write this story, to honour it and put it in a literary work, because documentaries, news articles – they can be manipulated later. Some other academic will write a book and change the facts and figures and all of these things, but literature preserves, it preserves the story, it tells the story, and I want to tell this story forever.”

'We're humans' 

While Application 39 gives room to solemnity, it is also full of dark humour.

Audience groans and laughter converge as we learn that some of the politicians most reviled by Palestinians remain in power 15 years later. Some joy and revulsion, too, when we learn offhand that Scotland, now the Republic of Scotland, hosted a new Olympic discipline: drone racing.

IT department employees Rayan and Salma (played by Sama Rantisi) steer us through almost every possible emotion via dance, protest, injury, and labour. They encourage the audience to chant, to cheer, and to clap, and we can’t help but laugh.

How does Ahmed maintain and write with a sense of humour despite his grief?

He says, “As a Palestinian from Gaza who has lost family members in this genocide, I think it is important to keep the humour going as a reminder of humanity, a reminder of who we are.

“We’re not just numbers, we’re not just rubble, we’re not just bodies, we’re not just stats – we’re humans.”

“Comedy punctures through the image of the Palestinian victim who is always crying and shouting. Subconsciously, the audience thinks ‘Oh, they can crack a joke.’ People change their concept about that character through laughter,” he continues. 

Maintaining hope 

Planning for the Olympics eight years ahead, the Gaza municipality employees are compelled to think about the kind of future they want to see for themselves and their city, which suffers 'ghettoisation' and constant and invasive surveillance of unprecedented scale – even for Gaza.

Despite their suffocating living conditions, Rayan and Salma’s boss Lama (played by Sara Masry) clings tight to compliance, and to doing everything possible to maintain a ceasefire (at least to begin with), while other characters question whether it is worth being alive at all while living under such crushing oppression – a tension present among Palestinians in Gaza now, Ahmed says.

As Israel fights Gaza’s hosting of the Games and attempts to pit different Arab, Palestinian, and Gazan states against each other, the employees rally to call for unity and protest by the outside world.

The show of solidarity does come, but it might be too late.

Here lies a call to action for the audience of the present. It might have been too late to bring about change in the 2040s, but what if an unprecedentedly massive, coordinated, effective, and popular mobilisation were to happen now, in 2025?

The call that might fall on weary and despondent ears in the audience. Israel has been allowed to commit genocide in Gaza for more than 600 days now, killing more than 60,000 Palestinians.

Still, Ahmed maintains hope.

“As much as I was prophetic about the awful things, I hope that I am prophetic about the hope at the end… I hope that we’ll be able to end it through people, and the power of people coming together,” he says.

“If governments fail to stop this and make a change, the people will force it somehow.”

[Cover photo: Photography by Zoe Birkbeck]

Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London. She was previously a staff journalist and news editor at The New Arab

Follow her on X: @shahlasomar