Text: Günseli Yalcinkaya Artwork: Yasmin Ahram
In Gaza, a group of young Palestinians have found temporary freedom in the act of parkour, reimagining wreckage and ruins as a series of high-octane playgrounds. The fearless collective see freerunning as a way of taking their immediate environment to its absolute limits – and, in the process, claiming a part of it back.
YOUNG PALESTINIANS ARE JUMPING ACROSS the wreckage of the al-Jalaa tower, an 11-storey building in Gaza once home to the Associated Press and Al Jazeera television, as well as 60 residential homes.
Dozens of the group, many of them just teenagers, scale the debris. Bounding from ruin to ruin, they perform daunting tricks at stomach-churning heights. Running across rooftops, they leap and swing off the exposed scaffolding, before tumbling onto the sand floor below.
These images first began to surface online in May 2020. Just hours before, the Israeli army had bombed the building with fighter jets as part of a relentless 11-day conflict which saw hundreds of Palestinian people killed, thousands injured and tens of thousands more displaced. Retaliatory rockets from Hamas resulted in the death of 13 people in Israel. In this context, the images take on extra weight: each flip, twist, and jump becomes an act of freedom.
“When people see a destroyed building in Gaza, it’s easy to scroll down and forget about it,” begins 25-year-old Ahmad Matar, one of the founding members of Gaza Parkour (Gaza PK), the collective documented that day. “But when you see a person flip off that building, they understand what’s happening in a deeper way. They think, ‘Okay, these people just want their freedom.’”
Originating in Paris in the ’80s, parkour – or freerunning – is a sport where seemingly mundane urban environments are transformed into boundless obstacle courses. This can mean running across buildings, or leaping to improbable heights; vaulting, swinging and rolling. But it’s also about pushing the boundaries of city structures beyond their conventional means. Propelled by the sport’s popularity on YouTube, parkour has evolved into a thriving, expansive community, with thousands of mostly young men competing in competitions across the globe.
For Ahmad, who began performing parkour in 2005 at the age of nine while living in the Khan Yunis refugee camp situated in the southern Gaza Strip, parkour is an escape from the grim realities of the occupation. Now based in Sweden, he recalls the first time he and his friend Mohammed Aljakhabir stumbled across a YouTube video of the sport and becam
