Parkour in Gaza: Radical imagination in practice

“’What is there beyond the sky?’ I asked my mother. ‘Paradise.’ ‘What does it look like?’ ‘Like children’s dreams’” – Refaat Alareer

Amid thousands of harrowing videos—scenes of Palestinians murdered, neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, layers of white body bags, convoys of blindfolded men, the flash of white phosphorus and empire’s arsenal—one video stood apart. Filmed at a UNRWA school, it captured something profoundly different, something that has stayed with me. Hundreds of people sheltered in a narrow hallway, with the second and third floors filled, all eyes on Akram Abu-Adhara, a young parkourist, as he launched himself from a corridor, flipping once, twice—beyond count. In sandals, just like any of them. He seemed weightless, soaring above the immense pain that surrounded him, the eternal weight of Gaza’s death and devastation. Children paused mid-step to watch, a few smiles breaking through the grief. Laundry dried on guardrails that had once bordered classrooms, an audience of the displaced captivated by the brief wonder of gravity defied.

Originally published in Dazed MENA issue 00 | Order here

In Gaza, parkourists live a shared reality: family members murdered, homes destroyed, lives shattered under siege. Yet somehow, they find the spirit to do more than simply survive the deadliest assault on Palestinian life—they affirm the fullness of living, proving its worth beyond erasure. I rewatched the video of Akram over and over. It ends with a dismount, a smile. For the first time since the genocide began, I felt a smile too. I felt a promise, the kind that must infuriate the racist logic of Israel’s apartheid system: the Israeli regime will never win. How could it, against a free people who have shown that they cannot be broken?

I spoke to Gaza’s parkourists about what parkour means to them–not just as a sport but as a culture of freedom, community, sacrifice, and dream-making. For nearly two decades, parkour has guided them as a compass and alternative liberatory headspace. Since 2005, as Gaza has endured a relentless siege within over seven decades of settler-colonial erasure, parkour has provided a rare freedom—a platform for collective expression and a means to embody and share a reality of defiance to the outside world.

Ahmad Matar has spent the majority of his life dedicated to the freedom that parkour provides. Since 2016, he has lived in Sweden, leaving Gaza to pursue parkour full-time. Yet even from afar, he holds the legacy and spirit of Palestinian parkour. He began in 2005 and is one of the original parkourists who trained with Gaza Parkour, the very first parkour team led by Abdullah Inshasi and Mohammed Aljalhbir. He was nine years old, training in martial arts, when he saw the two leaping across walls and flipping off buildings, everything changed. Parkour has entered his dream state, determines who his community is, and dictates what he does in his free time. “Simply put, it is everything,” he says.

Since 2005, a network of parkour crews has emerged across the besieged Gaza Strip. Ahmad began in Khan Younis, where he and the Gaza Parkour crew would practice in the city’s cemetery – the sandy ground was forgiving, and fewer people were there to judge or chase them away. In those early days, they felt empowered to craft their own parkour culture, becoming engulfed, even obsessed, as they made videos daily, fearlessly. Gaza shapes their culture, he says; it’s part of the reality of being from Gaza to take risks, “Palestinians from Gaza are crazy,” Ahmad says, half-jokingly. 

Not much has changed since those early days. From the beginning, Gaza’s parkourists turned to social media to show the world who they were, intent on unveiling the unimaginable reality of life under siege. For them, parkour is their embodiment of defiance—a proof of life and a way to reclaim something vital even under occupation. It’s not about Western depictions of resilience or liberal ideals of non-violence; it’s the raw assertion of authority over one’s own life, a refusal to be erased. Their message resonated, drawing attention from global TV networks curious about Palestine’s parkour scene. But reality soon set in: Gaza’s parkourists were not like other teams in the world. As their scene grew, so did the brutal realities of occupation and siege. “We lived through many wars. Tanks right in front of us. Apaches, bombed-out buildings nearby,” Ahmad tells me. But despite the occupation’s violence, parkour remained their mindset: “You conquer your own borders, you fly, learn, and dream. Even if the dream of freedom isn’t yet real, one day it will be. That’s what parkour teaches us.”

This dream holds sacrifice. Its bearers carry the weight of what freedom means, and few embody this responsibility like Mahmoud Alghalbawi, who continues to practice parkour under genocide. Mahmoud, originally from the Al-Saftawi neighbourhood in northern Gaza, is now displaced in Deir Al-Balah. He and his friends formed the Free Gaza crew, an ensemble of parkourists, circus, and street performers. Mahmoud is carrying the baton from Gaza’s original parkour crews, mesmerised by their magic and immediately hooked; the Free Gaza crew is a continuation of that legacy. Before the genocide, “There were 8 of us. Now 4 are martyred: Ahmed Abu Hasira, Salah Abu Harbid, Atta Ghaith, and Mahmoud Abu Sharkh. May God have mercy on their souls. Regardless of everything, we are continuing.”

Only 22 years old, Mahmoud speaks with an agency and maturity born of a lifetime under Israeli blockade. He interprets life through the perspective of someone who has observed the realities of protracted catastrophe. He says his life was taken away from him, and his goal now is to ensure that the next generation does not lose theirs. Like many in Gaza’s parkour crews, he has spent the last 400+ days trying to survive and, when possible, going to displacement shelters or camps to train the next generation. “There are more people doing parkour than before the genocide. For those who might have been afraid before, there is no more fear. Young people are doing anything to get out of their bodies. Anywhere you look, you see kids jumping around and flipping.”

To Mahmoud, parkour is more than a sport—it’s a reclamation of the Palestinian body, a vehicle for liberation. In a racist world where Palestinian lives are treated as disposable and their blood cheapened, Mahmoud’s transformation of his body as a medium of expression, resistance, and survival is profoundly radical. “Your body becomes the sport,” he says, a portal to a world where he exists freely, can create, and breathe despite the suffocating grip of genocide. Mahmoud and all of Gaza’s parkourists defy the forces attempting to erase them, declaring through their bodies, through motion and imagination, that Palestinian life is neither invisible nor disposable.

For Palestinian parkourists in Gaza, having endured the loss of family members and friends, day after relentless day, they find themselves suspended—a place where the calm needed to fully mourn the dead has not yet come. Living in this liminal space, caught between holding onto life and witnessing loved ones killed, has dissolved whatever mundane fears once lingered. “The world has sold us out. We have nothing left to lose,” Mahmoud tells me.

Like the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, Mahmoud is also starving. While on the phone with him, he walked through the empty market, explaining that at first, it was just that food was too expensive to buy; now, there is simply nothing to eat. Despite the dehumanisation surrounding him, Mahmoud continues to train, even if only for five minutes. “If I realise I haven’t practised during the day,” he says, “even if I’m travelling huge distances to forage food, I’ll stop what I’m doing and jump across whatever walls I can find.” Mahmoud, who won first place in parkour freestyle during Palestine’s 2019 parkour competition, says that instead of attending competitions he’s been invited to in Europe and the Arab world, he is dying of hunger. For now, Mahmoud dreams of a ceasefire and has a GoFundMe campaign if anyone is able to support him and his family. 

Starvation, destruction, the annihilation of their homeland—realities that should haunt anyone reading. Yet, for Mahmoud, his dreams have not evaporated. He wants the sons and daughters of Palestine, and those supporting the cause beyond the homeland, to know that whatever happens, however difficult the days to come, they will never give up on parkour. “It is our freedom,” he reminds me. “If I don’t play today, I won’t live until tomorrow.” Whether in shelters, tents, or the ruins of his neighbourhood, this freedom is something profound—something those outside Gaza—the Western diplomats, apologists, and architects of a genocidal regime—may never understand. “This freedom is something big, something that deserves to be realised. It grows inside of you, shaping yourself and everything around you.” Palestinian parkourists in Gaza are indomitable in their craft, defying every form of colonial violence. Their movements are acts of life created in resistance to the deathscapes imposed upon them.

Originally published in Dazed MENA issue 00 | Order here

production FATIMA MOURAD & SARRA ALAYYAN