Abstract
As a physical culture, parkour sits at the intersection of spatial resistance and physical self-discipline, requiring one to disobey rules of urban space while simultaneously enacting control over one's own body. Across the occupied Gaza Strip, multi-generational parkour groups have become popular amidst the backdrop of restricted personal freedoms and physical cultural opportunities. Since 7 October 2023, escalating genocide, structural violence, and humanitarian crises in Gaza have halted many aspects, practices, and aspirations of everyday life, including sports. We analyzed the resilience of Gaza-based parkour groups as embodied decolonial praxis for Palestinians of all genders and across (dis)ability living under ever-changing conditions of life in Gaza. Using the theoretical framework of Sumūd, a Palestinian decolonial epistemology, and a netnographic methodology, we posit parkour as an embodied decolonial praxis, cultivating an emotional reclamation of land and community resurgence. This project also highlights difficulties in gathering data during the period between October 2023-August 2024 due to the disruptions in internet networks, media archives, and parkour spaces. Nevertheless, through parkour, Palestinians challenge settler-colonial spatialities and temporalities through constructing their own time/space continuums, cultivating land-based relationships, committing to psychosomatic self-discipline, refusing debilitation, and embracing joy.
Introduction
The ongoing blockade and genocide imposed by the Israeli State on Palestinians in Gaza begets the question of life: who, how, and where does one deserve to live? These questions have continuously been applied to those in Gaza, holding a liminal space between life and death. A consequential feature of Palestinian national history is its traumatic encounter with Zionism's ideological ethnocracy in the nineteenth century which saw the devastation of Palestinian land, culture, and people (Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024; Said, 1981). The Palestinian position is often marked by narratives of lawlessness, loss, grief, and struggle. However, aligning with politics of Sumūd (Meari, 2014), defined as Palestinian steadfastness, this paper refuses the depiction of Palestinians as consumed by suffering. Rather, our focus is on embodied decolonial praxis enlivened by parkour for Palestinian traceurs (parkour athletes), through both outdoor or indoor trainings.
Parkour's significance in Gaza is its transmutational quality—the physical culture demands maneuvering efficiently through an urban environment despite its obstacles. Traceurs thrive on an ever-changing environment, evading the state logics of control and containment. Thorpe and Ahmad (2015) and Thorpe (2016) provide extensive analysis of Parkour in Gaza, which has been growing in popularity since a group of young Palestinians who initially trained together in cemeteries and abandoned ruins established a parkour team in 2005 after the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip. This work echos many of their findings on youth agency, creativity, and embodied freedom when parkour in Gaza is performed by young Palestinians (Thorpe, 2016, Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). We extend their analysis by adopting a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2010) and focusing on embodied decolonial praxis. Through focusing on photos, videos, captions, and comments posted online during times of war, rather than conducting our own interviews with participants who have lived, worked, or volunteered in the West Bank and/or Gaza, as Thorpe and colleagues did, we were able to examine how traceurs represent themselves to the world through different socio-political-spatial moments. Our unique contribution is highlighting the role of digital storytelling about parkour in promoting liberatory mobility, allowing Palestinians in Gaza to continually engage in embodied decolonial praxis in the face of colonial control and genocide. Using the theoretical framework of Sumūd as anti-colonial being and decolonial becoming (Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024; Meari, 2014; Rijke and Van Teeffelen, 2014; Schwabe, 2019), we analyzed the documentary, One More Jump (Gerosa, 2019), in addition to social media and web data from parkour athletes on the ground in Gaza, to highlight their first-hand experiences in the context before and during the ongoing genocide.
Sumūd entails a daily practice of nonviolent resistance against multiple dimensions of colonial power and is characterized by strengthening and asserting Indigenous ways of life and nationhood (Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024). Following Charnley (2021), we use the capital “I” in Indigenous to honor and respect the legitimacy of Palestinians on their ancestral lands, just as proper noun designations have been historically assigned to other placed identities such as Chinese or French.
In cultivating Sumūd, Palestinians disrupt colonial logics of subjugation and eradication prescribed by occupying forces. Decolonial praxis is not solely characterized by resisting coloniality but also entails centering ancestral practices of living and being (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). While parkour is not a Palestinian ancestral practice, its re-interpreted training philosophy facilitates continuous acts of relationality with the land itself. Many scholars (Ahmed et al., 2021; McGuire-Adams, 2020) posit land-based physical activity as an alternative pathway for reconnection with the land and with one's kin. Additionally, parkour, like many movement practices, counters colonial constraints placed on the colonized body (Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). It is indeed through bodily movement, mobility, and physicality that Palestinians engage in decolonial praxis (Akkad, 2023; Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024; Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). We highlight the potential of parkour (a non-Indigenous practice) as a form of Sumūd for Palestinians in Gaza, that expands gendered and (dis)ability-based boundaries. This potential exists through the decolonial praxis of maneuvering colonial demise, and refusing death, debilitation, and disconnection from Indigenous land and kin.
Life under occupation in Gaza
Located in the southwest of the Levant, bordered by Egypt and Israel, the Gaza Strip is a mere 41 km long and 10 km wide region, housing approximately two million Palestinians, 64% of whom are refugeed—that is, actively displaced, 54% living in poverty, and 33% in severe poverty (Farhat et al., 2023; O’Toole, 2019; OCHA, 2020). Known as one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Gaza's cramped living conditions and inadequate public infrastructure are outcomes of Israel's ongoing blockade (Al Jazeera, 2021; Farhat et al., 2023; OCHA, 2020). Israel's control of Gaza's land, borders, airspace, and water systems works to constrain and oversee all aspects of Palestinian life (Farhat et al., 2023; Sorkin et al., 2020; Zureik, 2016). A large population of Gaza is comprised of refugeed Palestinians who were displaced from nearby Palestinian cities and villages during the 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe) and the 1967 Naksa (the setback; Farhat et al., 2023; Frankel, 2023). In addition to the blockade, various Jewish-only Israeli settlements were established throughout Gaza, acting as surveillance stations that further controlled Palestinian sovereignty, until they were dismantled in 2005 (Frankel, 2023; Mbembe, 2003).
Achille Mbembe described the Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine, and more specifically Gaza, as “a concentration of multiple powers” which attempt to debilitate and capitulate the Palestinian people (2003: 29). Among these powers acting upon the Palestinian people includes the necropolitical, which refers not just to the administration of life and death, but rather an injury state through subjugation and siege (Mbembe, 2003). The reality of Palestinian life in Gaza, as prescribed by their occupiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), is one of constant navigation through ultramodern surveillance systems and the threat of violence through high-tech weapons (Asi et al., 2022; Farhat et al., 2023). The all-encompassing nature of the Israeli occupation, blockade, and genocide in Gaza necessitates intentional coping strategies to maintain steadfast decolonial perseverance. Each coping strategy must address and resist the arms of colonial violence that seek to disempower and debilitate the Palestinian population.
Parkour as discipline and urban resistance
Parkour has been practiced in Gaza since 2005, when a local team founder discovered the sport by watching the Jump London documentary on Al-Jazeera (Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). Parkour was initially created in the twentieth century by French naval officer George Hébert, whose method of training the body and mind in open environments was thought to produce greater psychosomatic benefits than those derived from more traditional sports (Atkinson, 2009; Kidder, 2013; Ortuzar, 2009). Abreu (2020) defines parkour as a holistic practice comprising efficient and creative maneuvering movement tactics to navigate various terrains. Popularized by groups such as The Yamakasi in the 1980s, parkour's original purpose is grounded in navigating barriers with maxim efficiency (Abreu, 2020; Kidder, 2013; Ortuzar, 2009). Parkour focuses on training in the urban environment, requiring not just physical bodyweight strength, but psychological courage in the face of risk (Atkinson, 2009). For many traceurs, the sport's appeal comes from its philosophy as a seemingly no-competition, no-rules, anarchist practice that defies institutionalized sporting practices and the conventions of urban space (Sterchele and Camoletto, 2017; Wheaton, 2013). Parkour is an adaptable physical activity, allowing traceurs to find their own meaning through embodied practice (De Martini Ugolotti and Moyer, 2016). Parkour blurs the lines between risk-taking and uninhibited creativity; discipline and chaos; allowing traceurs to engage in self-expression while simultaneously enacting somatic agency (Abreu, 2020; Sterchele and Camoletto, 2017).
Conventional rules of urban space use are enforced through social and police surveillance, which seek to reduce undesirable behaviors: loitering, public nuisance, and property damage (Abreu, 2020; Sterchele and Camoletto, 2017). Through exerting agency and control over one's own body in public urban space, traceurs not only disobey these rules, but they also control and reimagine their environmental surroundings (Kidder, 2017). In Gaza, parkour is more than just a type of exercise. At the individual level, parkour can be understood as a simultaneous test of fortitude and an exploration of the limits of one's psyche and physical environment (Kidder, 2013: 231; Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). Participants can explore mental, emotional, and physical limits by “playing with fear” (Saville, 2008: 908) and reinterpreting obstacles as possibilities (Bavinton, 2007). As such, this article interprets new outcomes and potentials of parkour in the Gazan context, as it manifests as a practice of Sumūd. Here, Palestinian traceurs maneuver through different margins of society: the physical (war-torn infrastructure), the structure (settler-colonialism, occupation), and the psychological (presumed demise and hopelessness).
Palestinian movement as decolonial praxis and placemaking
For many Palestinians across geographies, physical activity can be a site of quotidian resistance to ongoing colonial systems of oppression and subjugation. Across the West Bank of Palestine, the UK-based non-profit organization, SkatePal (n.d.) constructs skate parks and offers skateboarding lessons to Palestinian youth of all genders. For Palestinians in the West Bank, skateboarding is a means through which they can experience what Akkad describes as “occupied joy” (2023). Occupied joy is a rupture: an opening of decolonial cracks that defy the colonial ordinance of suffering imposed by the Israeli settler state onto Palestinians (Akkad, 2023). By skateboarding on Palestinian land, youth produce their own joy, untouched and unprescribed by the settler state which imposes restrictions on most other aspects of life.
For many Palestinians, both in the homeland and the diaspora, traditional dance has also been a site of identity assertion and resistance to settler-colonial culturicide. Dabke, a folkloric dance performed across Levantine Arab communities, has played a unique role in the Palestinian context: one of anti-colonial orientation and unapologetic land-based fellahi (peasantry characterized by land stewardship) origin (Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024). Palestinian dabke performances incorporate sartorial and sonic elements reflecting both the cultural expression and political attunement of this traditional dance. The fellahi origins of many dabke movements can be seen, for example, in stomping as an allusion to preparing soil for farming (Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024). For Palestinians in the diaspora, forcibly displaced from their homeland, performing the dabke soothes the pain of exile and enacts community-based healing through shared memory and embodied resistance (Hamdonah and Joseph, 2024).
Parkour in Gaza has been a site of interest for many scholars and spectators, especially regarding athletes’ use of social media to connect with international audiences (Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015; Thorpe and Wheaton, 2021). Outdoor parkour practices, taken up by Palestinian men and boys in Gaza since 2005, have offered not only low-cost physical activity opportunities, but have also been a site to develop socio-psychological steadfastness and intergenerational mentorship (Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). Parkour groups address the unique needs of youth in the face of ongoing conflict, occupation, blockade, and post-disaster (Thorpe, 2016). Through engaging in social media networks, traceurs publicly perform quotidian resistance to these colonial conditions and create networks of opportunity with non-profits and international advocates (Thorpe, 2016; Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015; Thorpe and Wheaton, 2021). Parkour is more than an “action sport” when used towards youth future liberation.
Methods
This work follows a netnography and media analysis approach. To allow the images and stories of Palestinian traceurs to inform our analysis, we used a netnographic approach to capture both organic first-hand narratives, through social media and public engagement including the Instagram and website of the parkour athletes as well as guided first-hand narratives in a full-length feature documentary titled One More Jump (Gerosa, 2019). The documentary follows a parkour team in Gaza, as well as the experiences of one of their co-founders who immigrated to Italy. This article focuses less on those aspects of media analysis that deal with cinematography, rather we focus on the testimonies from Palestinian traceurs themselves.
Audiovisual media content reviewed included 30 sources gathered from individual parkour athletes, coaches, and group social media accounts (e.g. Instagram, YouTube), news media, and independent videos, including an official Palestinian parkour organization's account, which documents the progress of the non-profit organization's activity in Gaza and other Global South locations. 28 Instagram posts (photographs and videos) were analyzed alongside their captions from eight unique accounts. This breadth of sources provides both an understanding of parkour in Gaza as both grassroots, organized group activity and as an individual spontaneous undertaking.
Social media and websites are places where internet technology and local/global culture meet; the topics and methods of netnography offers rich understandings of “technocultures,” that is, the ways technologies and cultures intertwine, the ways we relate to one another about and through technologies and connective media, and the ways we become “part of a historical trajectory that includes, recapitulates, and extends our past” (Kozinets, 2021: 6) particularly if we are people invested in online communities. Though there are myriad ways to conduct a netnography, Kozinets (2021: 7) details that, at their core, netnographies rely on social media data and “the central conception of the netnographic-researcher-as-instrument, to form cultural understandings about language, power, identity, and desire in the worlds where technology and the social intersect.” In sum, “when something is posted on social media, netnography is there to tell us not merely what it says, but what it means” (Kozinets, 2021: 8). Researchers have always been interested in understanding human behavior. Now that behavior has moved online through sharing photos, videos, comments, discussions, feedback, information, and advice, researchers can unobtrusively adapt ethnographic research techniques to the study of cultures and communities using online formats (Kozinets, 2010, 2015), especially if those subcultures deal with illegal, taboo, difficult, stigmatized, or political topics with which might otherwise be more difficult to study face-to-face (Kozinets, 2015). A netnographic process applied here to consider the power dynamics between traceurs in Gaza under occupation, involved defining the research question, determining social media user characteristics, identifying community members and media sources, observation and data gathering, analysis of data, and interpretation of findings. We did not enter and exit the online community, nor did we connect with human research participants in-person or online. Instead, we inductively analyzed themes developed after viewing the publicly available documentary and videos without preconceived themes informing the data collection.
We wish to acknowledge the complications of collecting data during a time of genocide in Gaza, where access to connectivity networks was precarious and journalists were systematically targeted (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2024; Euro-Med Monitor, 2024). Prior to October 2023, there was consistent journalistic coverage of parkour groups, as well as greater information shared by parkour groups themselves on their respective social media accounts. In this politicized context of information transparency, the restriction of data available is data within itself as it reflects the systematic erasure of Palestinian life and livingness. That said, this project makes use of the limited data available between October 2023 and August 2024 in addition to those sources produced before this time.
We would also like to clarify our ethical and political commitments in preventing additional harm to those parkour athletes currently living under conditions of genocide in Gaza. While this project follows a netnographic method, which solely uses publicly available online data and does not include interpersonal contact with these parkour athletes, we see an imperative to protect these athletes’ identities to the maximum of our ability. As such, we have anonymized the names of athletes in an effort to prevent targeted acts of violence as seen in the systematic killing of Palestinian journalists by the IDF (World, 2025).
Once the audiovisual data was translated into textual notes, the first author carried out a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022). Reflexive thematic analysis follows the six-step process of data immersion, coding the data, generating themes from the codes, reviewing the themes, signifying and defining the themes, and reporting on the themes (Braun and Clarke, 2022). A reflexive thematic analysis acknowledges the impossibility of analyzing data in a vacuum and instead openly interrogates the ways in which the researchers’ own positionalities can be a rich resource of insight (Braun and Clarke, 2022). In addressing our own positionalities, the first author is a queer Lebanese-American, the second author is a Palestinian Canadian, and the third author is a Black Caribbean-Canadian. We have all studied decoloniality intellectually and through embodied physical activity as praxis. The second and third authors offered insights and feedback on the themes and codes developed, further expanding the analysis and contributing directly to the writing process. This project adopted a relativist ontology and interpretivist-constructionist epistemology that acknowledges contextual and cultural subjectivities within knowledge production. The following themes are organized in both descriptive and chronological manners to reflect the parkour athletes’ sport adaptations to the ever-changing context of life under occupation. This chronology is organized into three distinct time periods within which parkour in Gaza took different forms, where respective sub-themes related to group dynamics, emotional outcomes, and nonviolent resistance (to name a few) were developed using thematic analysis. Within each chronological grouping, we interrogated how the information shared online by Gazan traceurs demonstrated a relationship between this land-based physical activity and the socio-political-spatial environment of the moment.
Finding 1: Establishing parkour in Gaza as Sumūd (2005–2020)
In 2005, a group of young Palestinian men discovered parkour as a physical culture of discipline, stealth, and power (Grima and Ottomanelli, 2013; Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). As established by Thorpe and Ahmad (2015), this new sport not only offered an activity to fill time amidst rampant unemployment, but also became a training system through which Palestinians could experience a growth in confidence and re-motivate their intergenerational aspirations of freedom and dignity. Traditionally, sports like soccer or dances like dabke have been contexts for preserving cultural identity and establishing community groups within Gaza. Here, the novel nature of parkour allowed traceurs to train according to values reflecting the culture in Gaza, filling certain gaps in the social education of younger generations (Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). As a sport, parkour requires an inner steadfastness and self-discipline to successfully perform maneuvers, creating a somatic ritual of Sumūd that is transferable to other aspects of life in Gaza. In this way, Palestinian parkour groups indirectly worked towards preparing a community of athletes for the inevitable struggles to come, both psychologically and somatically—a finding emphasized by Thorpe and Ahmad in their 2015 study. ‘For a generation of young Palestinians who have grown up in a flood of under-employment, it has become a method of self-expression, an escape, and a way of life. The idea of parkour is to “find your own way”, and failure became a victory in itself; proof that you’ve tried and learned. The lines blurred until all obstacles in their lives became walls, waiting to be overcome.’ (Wall Runners, 2020a)
Early parkour practice within Gaza took place outdoors among young Palestinian men and boys. For parkour community leaders, this physical culture was not solely an opportunity to gain athleticism or to compete, but rather a site for enculturation and mentorship of young Palestinians (Gerosa, 2019; Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). Palestinian parkour is unique in its framework, which upholds five values of engagement (with oneself and others) as opposed to strict rules of play (Gerosa, 2019). First and foremost, there is no competition between traceurs, allowing participants to intuitively develop their capabilities and goals. Secondly, traceurs must be attentive to their surroundings, considering factors of safety with every maneuver. Third, traceurs must be respectful of themselves and others, allowing everyone to share in the gifts of mentorship. Fourth, traceurs must be confident, as parkour relies on trust in one's abilities to achieve a maneuver successfully. Finally, traceurs must be modest and practice humility, especially in situations where one's physical safety could be jeopardized with a wrong move (Gerosa, 2019). These five values established a code of conduct grounded in safety and support that transfers to a psychosomatic resilience required of those living in Gaza under constant threat of colonial violence.
In the Western context, parkour is imagined as an anarchist rebellion against their own society's behavioral conventions (Atkinson, 2009). For Palestinian traceurs, this rebellion does not occur against their own society; rather, rebellion occurs in friction with their occupiers. As a result, outdoor Palestinian parkour training took place far from urban centers as a sign of respect and consideration to their neighbors, as reflected in the block quote below. The architecture of cemeteries and abandoned Israeli settlements offered a space where traceurs could access “feeling freedom while training,” where they could configure their bodies in non-traditional and experimental ways (Wall Runners, 2020b). In this outdoor space, abandoned settlements were re-imagined as playgrounds, and cemeteries were a space to escape the necropolitical condition of death within everyday life. When Parkour started in Gaza it was undesirable sport so the Gaza Parkour Team decided to start doing Parkour in the cemetery, there was the place where people don’t get disturbed in the same time there were a lot of obstacles and walls, it was so much fun but a hard place for someone who wants to start Parkour where there's no trainers or any soft material to start with, [one team member] saying ‘it was hard for my father to accept me training at the cemetery’ And for a lot of parents too it will be hard to accept. (Wall Runners, 2020c)
Finding 2: Moving parkour indoors: women, girls and disabled freedom in Gaza (November 2020–October 2023)
In November of 2020, Gaza's first indoor parkour gym was established with a team of permanent coaches and a range of free classes offered (Wall Runners, 2020d). This new parkour environment sought to address the anxieties of both interested participants and the broader community who were concerned about the lack of safety and social acceptance of cemetery parkour training. Contrasting the rigid architecture of the outdoor training environment, Wall Runners designed this space with the intention of “teaching the younger generation with the safety of an equipped gym” (Wall Runners, 2020e). Jungle gym structures were built by hand by Palestinian carpenters, murals were painted by local artists, and the floor was covered in padded mats sourced from a nearby sponge factory (Wall Runners, 2020f). The coaching staff included many experienced men from a Gazan parkour team in addition to a hijabi woman coach—pseudonymously referred to as Ibtissam—offering a visible introduction of women traceurs into Palestinian parkour spaces (Wall Runners, 2020d). Five days a week, free parkour classes taught by men coaches were offered for boys and men in three different age categories: 6–10, 11–15, and 15+. On Thursdays, the gym space was open only to women and girls in the same age categories, with classes taught by Ibtissam. By early 2021, Ibtissam's classes were packed with girls, eager to train (Wall Runners, 2021a). The safety and modesty of an enclosed space with padded flooring not only opened opportunities for more women and girls to train comfortably but also welcomed individuals with disabilities. In February 2021, an experienced traceur and single-leg amputee joined the coaching staff, teaching “classes for kids with disabilities” (Wall Runners, 2021b).
On the Wall Runners’ Instagram, we can see an image of a young boy doing a pull-up on a metal bar suspended between two wooden constructed boxes (estimated age 6–10). In another image, a man and a hijabi woman instructor watch students take turns on a maneuver involving putting hands on an approximately 1m2 wooden box, and jumping to lift their legs over the box. There are blue mats on the floor and graphic icons of traceurs painted on the walls. Other children of all genders, ages, and heights watch and wait for their turns. The caption reads: We are happy to finally share with you this big news, the first Parkour academy in Gaza ‘@wallrunnerz’ is finally ready and our coaches are working there to spread parkour in a safe environment for free for all Gaza Kids. We are happy to be a part of this project together with @wallrunnerz to make the parkour community in Gaza Bigger and bigger. (Wall Runners, 2020g)
The indoor space stands in contrast to the supposed lack of safety and taboo nature of outdoor, cemetery-based parkour. Regular parkour participation outdoors by women is rare (De Martini Ugolotti and Moyer, 2016), particularly in Gaza due to hegemonic gender differences, social power relations, and cultural norms of single-gender spaces. As such, offering women- and girls-only spaces, women instructors, and material resources that appeal to children, parents, women and girls, and also to disabled peoples—such as various and incrementally sized structures for climbing and jumping, soft cushions for landing and minimizing bodily risk—make the sport more appealing and accessible for a broader range of people.
In one image from Wall Runners’ Instagram advertising classes, young children in the indoor parkour gym pose for the photo alongside three parkour instructors, a hijabi woman and two men (Wall Runners, 2020d). One boy hangs upside down by his hands and feet from a metal bar affixed to two wooden structures. Others crouch atop wooden platforms or stand with one foot on a wooden box. One child is centered in the photo, doing an open leg split on the floor, with their chest towards the ground, propped up by their hands with bent elbows. The caption in Arabic and English describes the free courses available for children, the age groups welcomed, as well as a girls-only group led by a woman coach. Families are encouraged: “Parents should be with the kids at the first time” (Wall Runners, 2020d). The programming is advertised “for the lovers of Parkour and movement” (Wall Runners, 2020d).
Moving parkour indoors enabled one of the top priorities of the Palestinian community, as emphasized by parkour community leaders: the protection and cultivation of children's minds to prepare them with tools to support their own survival. In Gaza, 60% of the population is under the age of 24, thus constituting an incredibly young population (United Nations, 2022). In an interview with the BBC, one of the squad leaders expressed the importance of providing mentorship and teaching discipline to children interested in parkour: ‘[The children] have fears from the wars they’ve lived through in Gaza. We try to get the kids out of this mood. We try to get them to think about something positive. For us, the most important thing is to look after the child's mind.’ (BBC, 2018)
The trauma of war and occupation strips children of their childhoods, of their ability to experience safety and joy, and of a trust that they will experience safety and joy again one day. Indoor parkour offers them safety and stability in their training as opposed to outdoor parkour, and encourages play in an environment otherwise focused merely on reactionary survival. Parkour can offer training in “the management of risk, danger and violence; increased bodily consciousness and awareness of emotional reactions; embodied ways of knowing and experiencing the world; and ‘liberating’ experiences in overcoming physical limitations” (De Martini Ugolotti and Moyer, 2016: 197). Images that show a man instructor guiding young boy (estimated age 8–11) and a hijabi woman instructor supporting a young girl jumping (estimated age 12–16) reveal that developing risk management and body consciousness is not innate, it is taught through guidance and demonstration (Wall Runners, 2020h). An Instagram post reinforces the message that these skills are physical and mental. “Last week training was focusing on the precision jump, the precision jump is a skill where you need to be fully focused just on a jump on a certain point, it helps you to balance and control your mind” (Wall Runners, 2020h). That focus and control is ever more necessary when traceurs’ lives and homes are under threat. In November 2020, traceurs posted images of sourcing materials and equipment and materials, such as the foam needed for the flooring of the then new indoor parkour training facility (Wall Runners, 2020f). Six months later, in May 2021, the Yalla Parkour Film account posted images of the gym destroyed, turned to rubble and ruins by colonial violence. It is in these contrasting environments that parkour in Gaza takes place (Yalla Parkour Film, 2021).
Finding 3: Taking back the strip: land-based parkour in a time of genocide (October 2023–August 2024)
After Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the IDF began a retaliatory campaign of collective punishment against the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza (Amnesty International, 2024). Of the 2.2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, 1.9 million (86.3%) were forcibly displaced between October 2023 and October 2024, with death toll estimates reaching as high as 186,000 (Human Rights Watch, 2024; Khatib et al., 2024). In November 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that Israel was committing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, and in December 2024, Amnesty International reported that the totality of crimes committed by the IDF against Palestinians in Gaza amounted to genocide (Amnesty International, 2024; Human Rights Watch, 2024). This genocidal campaign in Gaza ushered in a new era of parkour in the Strip, marked by both loss and survival. Once again, parkour was forced outdoors into an unrecognizable terrain of rubble and ruins.
A parkour athlete—pseudonymously referred to as Khalid—belonging to the Free Gaza Circus used Instagram to document his training throughout the course of multiple displacements in this 15-month period. Khalid is captured backflipping, frontflipping, and running over the obstacles of fragmented cinder blocks and crumbled concrete (Free Gaza Circus, 2024a). The landscape is blanketed with a thick layer of dust, making the bright pattern of Khalid's black-and-white kuffiyeh (Palestinian cultural scarf) stand out. Partially destroyed buildings surround this courtyard of rubble, with exposed wire frames and split columns filling the entirety of the photo frame. “Let's go beyond the barriers of the rubble” reads the video's caption: a stark moment of hope and imagination against the backdrop of infrastructural ruin (Free Gaza Circus, 2024a). The rubble, identified as a “barrier,” provides a hostile space of jagged corners and mobility hazards—a space no longer hospitable to the Palestinians who once resided here. Khalid's gravity defiance offers himself and us, as spectators, relief, however momentary, from the devastation of this urban space, and hope that we too can transcend the grief we bear witness to. This moment of defiance embodies an act of refusal against the genocidal ordinance of despair: through parkour, Khalid appraised his environment as one capacious with playful potential.
For many parkour community leaders, the impacts of this genocide were most grievous. With the subsequent destruction of Wall Runner's reconstructed gym and the forced displacement of most Palestinians in Gaza, accessible opportunities to participate in parkour were stripped from those who had benefitted from the indoor training space: women, girls, and those with disabilities. Just 1 month into Israel's military campaign, coach Ibtissam took to Instagram to grieve the martyrdom of her brother and her son as well as the destruction of her home (Waleed, 2023). At the time of writing (February 2025), neither Ibtissam herself nor Wall Runners have announced her return to coaching the sport. As the only woman parkour coach in Gaza, this loss to the sports community weighs most heavily on women and girls who sought safety and connection through coach Ibtissam's leadership and indoor parkour spaces. In January 2024, Wall Runners also posted about suffering the loss of their Gaza gym manager who was “killed in an Israeli air strike along with some of his family members” (Wall Runners, 2024). As a result of numerous losses to this group's community and physical infrastructure, the Wall Runners no longer operate in Gaza according to their Instagram bio, now excluding Gaza from their list of locations (Wall Runners, n.d.). How can the closing, or total destruction, of gym doors still allow for the opening of other parkour possibilities?
The Free Gaza Circus, originally an academy for circus arts established in 2018, banded together with parkour athletes to host performances for displaced Palestinians throughout late-2023 and 2024 (Cultures of Resistance, 2024; Free Gaza Circus, 2024a). Circus artists and parkour athletes curated performances of physical talent and comedy to “help children escape the psychological pressures, disturbances and collisions caused by the war” (Free Gaza Circus, 2024b). Performances took place in the blue-painted courtyards of United Nations (UN) schools, which housed over 400,000 displaced Palestinians by December 2024 (Daily Sabah, 2024). Dozens of children and families gathered on the ground floor and spilled over upper-level balconies, captivated by the brightly dressed clowns and the impressive traceurs (Free Gaza Circus, 2024b). Ear-to-ear grins on young faces reflected the troupe's success in providing experiences that were, at minimum, distractions to the shared condition of displacement and grief, and for many facilitated joy and togetherness.
In previous iterations of parkour in Gaza, from its original outdoor context to its indoor form, the sport centered skills training as its main scope. Under these new conditions relegated again to the outdoor realm, athletes’ priorities have shifted away from individual skill attainment, now attending to a more widespread reach through spectatorship. In lieu of safe spaces for young children, girls, women, and those with disabilities to participate in and learn movement cultures like parkour and circus arts, these performances encouraged participation through hand clapping, dancing, crowd waving, and traditional seated (on the ground) spectatorship so that lively playfulness could still exist (Free Gaza Circus, 2024b).
Discussion: Movement, embodied joy, and decolonial mobility
Through parkour, Palestinians reject suffocation and cultivate their own joy, engage in self-discipline, and practice Sumūd under occupation. Palestinians in Gaza defy hopelessness through dreaming up better futures with whatever resources they can access (Hammad and Tribe, 2021). Sumūd plays a role in this acceptance of reality, which is not characterized by a lack of hope, but instead speaks to a practice of patience and making life more livable despite living under a totalitarian regime (Hammad and Tribe, 2021). In skateboarding, Akkad (2023) demonstrated that sustained sport, quotidian practice, is key for cultivating and maintaining Palestinian play, joy, and hope through reclaiming space and freedom of movement. As a physical culture, parkour is unique in that maneuvers are done by individuals, but most often occur in the context of a group or team environment. Through parkour, Palestinians get the opportunity to gather and formulate kinship and community relations with other humans and the more-than-human within an environment of support, mentorship, and care. In their discussion of disenfranchised immigrant youth in Italy, De Martini Ugolotti and Moyer (2016: 189) note “parkour practices, when enacted in urban public spaces, can represent attempts by groups of disenfranchised youth to negotiate their own formula of citizenship and inclusion … [and counter] the ‘anxious politics’ resulting from enhanced surveillance regimes.”
When parkour became possible indoors, the activity opened to a broader group of people—women, girls, and people with disabilities—who were then able to engage in the activity. Within a political situation that offers little-to-no employment opportunities and a lack of resources and opportunities for formal activities, boredom is rampant among the Gazan population (Booth and Balousha, 2017). Engaging in parkour disrupts the cycle of boredom imposed by the blockade that seeks to reduce Palestinians to a state of desperation. With regular physical practice and training, mental health and body strengthening, and joyful sociality, participants can generate a sense of hope. Hayes and Kaba (2023: 91) tell us “hope and grief can coexist, and if we wish to transform the world, we must learn to hold and to process both simultaneously. That process will, as ever, involve reaching for community.” It is critical to note the ways in which parkour is engaged in groups, among friends, and internationally, through sharing hope and grief over social media (Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015). Inherent in Palestinian parkour is the valuing of different styles and ways of moving, adapting to different physiques, prioritizing safety, and inclusion of women and those with mobility differences (Wheaton, 2016). What this study adds to previous analyses of parkour in Gaza is the additional dimension of Sumūd as an embodied decolonial praxis for Palestinians that transforms shape according to socio-politico-environmental contexts. Decolonial resistance must address what is imposed by the occupation in addition to providing fertile soil for what Walsh refers to as cimarronaje, imagining an otherwise, creating an alternate strategy or posture “that disobeys the reign and rule of coloniality and its axes of dehumanization” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 43). Indoor parkour enables imagining and practicing embodied freedom across gender, age, and (dis)ability.
When parkour was forced outdoors, due to the bombing of their training facility, the Free Gaza Circus, alongside traceurs, was able to step in and center joy and possibility. As Kaba writes, “Possibility is the hope we wear when we charge into battle …The restoration of possibility amid despair is an act of destruction paired with a call to imagine …histories that have not been written yet.” Among the traceurs identified within this study, parkour practiced within community arts initiatives, such as circus, proved to offer an additional means of negotiating citizenship. Internationally, circus practices linked to community outreach work, embodied practice, and personal and collective development (Purcell, 2009; Spiegel, 2019) offer important sites of counter-hegemonic struggle. Circus and parkour create opportunities to engage in a ludic counterpublic (Sheppard, 2011; Stamatiou, 2023): an intervention that invites critical consciousness, movement, improvisation, community engagement, through body, voice, and imagination all towards decolonial ends. It is precisely the incorporation of play—as engagement with pleasure, frivolity, joy, and subversion of the dominant order—that traceurs are able to reframe their own narrative of the land/rubble.
Conclusion
In this essay, we posited that participation in community-based physical cultures such as parkour is an act of decolonial praxis (Sumūd) for Palestinians in Gaza. Due to the ongoing blockade, occupation, and siege imposed by the Israeli settler state on the Gaza Strip, Gazans have become characterized as debilitated and impoverished victims. Through a diverse portfolio of surveillance, shootings, bombings, border patrols, and curtailment of imports and exports within the territory, Palestinians in Gaza experience a restriction on their movement and destruction of their built environment and land. In this paper, we highlighted how parkour in Gaza challenges these restrictions and instead promotes free movement, embodied liberation, and joy. Palestinian parkour offers a crack in colonial power structures because it is often practiced in a landscape of ruins, which sets the stage for intimate relationships with the physical land—a direct challenge to colonial systems that seek to sever the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their ancestral lands. Furthermore, parkour offers an avenue for cultivating discipline within the body and mind, allowing traceurs to be more prepared for the trials of daily life in Gaza under occupation, to adamantly refuse death by ensuring their own survival, as well as to take advantage of opportunities for play and connection with a child-like sense of freedom. Last, as a practice that privileges kinship relations and mutual respect between teammates, parkour is also a site of distraction from the hardships of life. Thus, the practice of parkour in this context is an act of refusal of the necropolitical powers that aim to instill debility and despair within Gaza. In Gaza, parkour is continuously reinterpreted to address the social, emotional, physical, and community-based needs of its practitioners and spectators, all while cultivating joy and Sumūd in the face of occupation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
