The man building swimming pools in Gaza

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, the man teaching Gaza's children to swim again.

0:28I'm standing now in the beach in the Albalah in front of a swimming school that has been built by hand on the beach. It's separated from the open sea using large charborines, sandbags, to protect it from the waves. It gives children a safe place to learn how to swim in the sea. It's a sunny morning on the beach in Deir Albalah, a city in the Gaza Strip. And Seham Tantes, a young journalist, is surrounded by children playing in the water as they wait for their swimming lessons to start.

1:07The daily lessons that are taught here on the beach attract hundreds of children every week. Mustafa is one of them.

1:19Just nine years old, he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. He's been taking lessons now for just over a month. And although he started from scratch, he's telling Seham what a great swimmer he's already become.

1:36Ten-year-old Maryam is also taking lessons on the beach. She too has got big plans for when she grows up. She wants to be a dentist. She tells Seham how happy she feels when she's swimming.

2:00She loves her swimming coaches, and her favourite strokes are backstroke and doggy paddle. Everywhere she looks, Seham can see children playing, learning how to dive, screaming with laughter in the water with their friends. The pool is a place of joy, but the war is never far away.

2:27Alma is 13. She was walking with her mother when an Israeli shell exploded nearby. Alma survived, but her mum was hit and killed by shrapnel.

2:51For Alma, like many of these children, the hours she spends on the beach are the only time that she's able to forget the scars that the war has left on her life.

3:05The beach where I am standing now and where the children are enjoying today are surrounded by thousands of tens of belonging to displaced families who were forced to flee their homes and their area when the war began. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the swimming school bringing joy to the children of Gaza again.

3:44Hello. Hi, I'm Jed. I'm going to turn my camera on to wave at you. Hang on. Hello. Hello. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. Amjad Tantes is a bit of a legend here at The Guardian. Two of his daughters, Malak and Anas, reported for The Guardian throughout the most recent conflict and are now here in the UK. And Seham, the journalist who was standing on the beach, is also his niece. As a journalist, Amjad's worked with our reporters for decades, as well as lots of other journalists from other publications across the world. But he's also been many other things. Photographer, strawberry farmer, father of seven.

4:33We're speaking to Amjad through a really shaky internet connection. From the tent he built his family in an informal settlement on a beach. But decades ago, he still lived in his home village in the north of Gaza, on a farm in Beit Lahir, which is where he was first introduced to swimming. At a very early age of five, six years old, we grew up in the farm. So we have a farm pool and this farm pool represented the major joy to all of us and all escaped during summer hot days. Basically, I learned swimming at the hand of my older brothers, especially my older brother, Bajat. With Bajat, who's also Seham's dad, he'd spent hours at a time swimming laps in a homemade two-by-two metre swimming pool on his family farm.

5:31And he got really good. By his early 20s, he even attempted to qualify to represent Palestine at the 2000 Olympics. But unfortunately, it was too late for me to achieve qualification records. I started as a professional swimmer at a very late age. So I decided to achieve my dream, my Olympic dream, by establishing this swimming initiative and achieving it via children and allow them to qualify, starting with the children as young as six. In 1999, Amjad started his swimming school to train the next generation of future Olympic swimmers, but also to try and provide Gaza's kids with life-saving skills.

6:22Yeah, unfortunately, at that time, every year we witnessed multiple drowning incidents. There were no lifeguards at all on the beach either. You know, we were under occupation and nobody cared about people dying on the beach. So this was another major objective for me to continue the swimming initiative. The problem was it was hard to find anywhere to run his lessons. So Amjad started building swimming pools. One after the other, they were destroyed in Israeli attacks. But he never gave up. Each time one pool was destroyed, he would build another. In fishing ports, on the beach, even on his family farm.

7:10Actually, I've repeatedly built pools an uncountable amount of time now. I cannot remember the number of pools I have to build and rebuild. At first, parents were scared of letting their kids join his lessons. Almost nobody in Gaza knew how to swim. But before long, work got out and the school took off. So as the swimming lessons grew in popularity, swimming started to become like the dream of every child in the town. But children could not pay or join the lessons. So I started to offer free swimming lessons for limited numbers of children who couldn't afford the lessons. And over the next 15 years, through repeated Israeli bombardments and terrible personal tragedies, his two young nephews were killed by the Israeli military on the roof of their family home in 2008.

8:11Amjad kept going. And then I have the idea of establishing a safe natural pool inside the sea itself, using the rubble of destroyed houses. And it was like one of the most successful and heavily beautiful pools that I have ever built. I used the foundation of destroyed houses to build this pool, like more than 1 ,000 square meter pool, which could host hundreds of children at the time.

8:58And then the recent and the ongoing conflict in Gaza broke out in October 2023. I know your family was displaced several times. Can you just describe what living through this last three years has been like? You know, we had to stop the initiative during the past two years as a result of the war. The war that destroyed everything, literally everything, including my entire beloved town of Beit Lahya in northern Gaza. My house, my family house, my new house I was about to move to. my paradise family farm, my swimming pools, all of them, and raised the lives of many of my most beloved ones, including my mother and my most beloved brother, Behjat.

10:02This was like the most catastrophic moment in my life. Bahjat was the one that taught me swimming in the first place and then inspired me to start this exceptional swimming initiative.

10:22We were walking, fleeing our house in North Rimbeet Lahya when we were fought cowardly targeted by an artillery shells on our back on the 22nd of march 2025 to die in my arms while fleeing our house in northern gaza was like the worst the worst imaginable the worst moment in life actually. While I survived the attack in body, I'm still struggling in spirit. I'm no longer the same person.

11:18Budget was not the only lose. I also lost more beloved ones, especially six of my young innocent swimming team members and assistant swimming teachers were killed. But tens of swimming students were killed, of those thousands, tens if not hundreds of them were killed.

11:51and the war was too painful to me, feeling massive sorrow with every news of the laws of every one of those dear to my heart people.

12:10I mean, words cannot begin to express the horrors of what you've gone through. I'm so sorry. I don't know how. I don't know how you keep going. The loss of Bahjat is the biggest motivator for me to do something to honour his life and his death. Bahjat was not like anybody else to me.

12:42so after all of these unthinkably awful things that have happened how did you find the strength to start thinking about starting up these swimming lessons again after all that we witnessed stay silent and act passively is more damaging to me and to my spirit than resuming and helping children recover from war and from traumas and offer them a rare chance to enjoy and reclaim part of their stolen childhood. So I had no choice regardless of all the challenges, but the challenges you know, were very immense. I am displaced in a tent, encampment on the beach, away from town, barely able to meet the basic needs of my family.

13:55All our pools were destroyed. Most of my assistant swimming teacher were either killed or fled the country before or during the war. I only had the sea. But still the sea is dangerous during summer. You have jellyfish, you have high waves, strong currents, rocks. So after thinking for many months, after the Seas fire. I had the idea of building a secured children's natural swimming pool. Yeah, but the dilemma was that there almost left no machinery to bring in foundation to build the walls of the secured swimming pools and take away sand and deepen the pools. No, I had also the financial resources to rent the very few machinery left.

15:02But I had my determination and I had my hands and also I had the faithful people that believed in me. So, tens of volunteers volunteers, volunteered with me along the past three months, trying to build these safe, secure, natural pools using very basic material, tarpaulins, sandbags, and excavating the beach by hand. And finally, we succeeded to build five pools that is being attended now by hundreds of children daily.

16:18I am happy, regardless of all of the losers, witnessing the children from all ages attracted to the bulls like magnets. I'm going to join the girls swimming. Check their skills. And you look away, there is no children. you look in the pool and there are like hundreds of children. This scene is like the most dear to my heart.

16:54Actually, most of them were orphans of war. Many of them are injured. So there are stories behind every child of these 700 children. But once the children attended these very beautiful places, they forget everything behind. You can only see joy in their eyes. They play, they sing, they keep crying my name.

17:35Abu Ahmad Tantis, Ali Shahbiyish! Abu Ahmad Tantis, Ali Shahbiyish! which is like Abu Ahmed, which is my nickname. Let us float. Abu Ahmed, let us resort. Just to relax. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

18:06This is like the most amusing moment for me when seeing them like happy, enjoying, forgetting their worst nightmares.

18:31It's such a beautiful thing that you've done for these children. Has this also helped you as well cope with everything you and your family have gone through? Actually, I helped myself in the first place by doing this. If I haven't done, I am surely dead now. So without doing this, I would have died standing idle without doing anything. While I had the ability to help many of these children would have made me die. I am alive again. And to help this amount of children is giving me a great feeling of happiness and enjoyment and recovering.

19:40Emma Graham Harrison, you are The Guardian's chief Middle East reporter based in Jerusalem. Amjad's just told us about these swimming lessons and the swimming pool he's just built for kids in Gaza and, you know, how they've become a magnet for children all across the neighbourhood. But the truth is that life for children in Gaza, aside from those small moments of joy, is really bleak. Could you just outline the situation for us on the ground there? So life in Gaza is really grim, really difficult in practical terms. The vast majority of the population have been displaced, are living in tents. the medical system has been destroyed so there's very little access to health care if people need it almost all schools have been damaged or destroyed those that are still standing are mostly being used as refugee shelters so kids not only aren't going to school they haven't been at school for three years now this is a highly educated population that literacy was really similar to uk levels about 98 before the genocide so there's a real commitment to that people are going to informal classes, they're trying to learn online.

20:54But if you think about they're trying to learn online in a place where there's no reliable electricity, where there's very limited access to data, all the things that kids need to study, peace, quiet, consistency, you know, they're in crowded tents and attacks are ongoing. Israel is still attacking. Yeah, and we should say that since the beginning of the so-called ceasefire, over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Yeah, I mean, I actually feel that it is probably impossible for any of us outside Gaza to fully comprehend the huge price that people are paying, particularly children.

21:32These are their formative years. And I think we have to remember, as well as this emotional and mental cost, that it's the physical price they've paid. Those who survived injuries are likely to have been affected by the famine last year, which stunts growth both physically and mentally. You know, it damages children at the most vulnerable stage of their lives. And, you know, when you think particularly of children, that this is 650 ,000 children, really, it does seem shocking that there isn't a greater sense of urgency. You mentioned before that the kind of conditions that families and children were living in.

22:15Of course, Israel is also currently continuing its blockade. It controls every type of food, medicine, equipment, anything that might help with the rebuilding of Gaza. It is in control of what comes in or comes out. since the ceasefire has there been any improvement in what families are able to get hold of just just to try and you know get the basics that they need to to survive so there has been some improvement malnutrition levels have fallen there is greater access to food but it's from an incredibly low baseline of which you know a large proportion of the population are regularly going hungry and now much of the population are sort of getting the bare minimum of calories needed to survive they're not getting balanced diets fresh fruit vegetables you know protein meat things like that what we're seeing is that the food that israel's allowing into gaza includes a lot of unhealthy but high calorie food like chocolate snacks crisps things like that what you have perhaps stretching above all these immediate deprivations of food of medical care is this terrible sense of limbo and I think one of the things that's particularly challenging for and frightening and difficult for parents in Gaza at the moment, is that part of this limbo involves sacrificing the destruction of their children's future because their children can't study.

23:55And I think that's what's particularly devastating about the lack of reconstruction, particularly the lack of reconstruction of schools, of the education sector. It's the fact that current conditions in Gaza amount to the daily destruction of the future of all the children in Gaza. Yeah, and I think that there's that UN stat that something like 97 % of schools were targeted or destroyed, which is staggering. I mean, that's just the decimation of Gaza's education system, isn't it? And again, it's not just the physical buildings. We come back to this issue of killings. You know, teachers, children have lost their teachers, teachers have been killed.

24:40Some of those who have been able to leave have left. So it's the loss of the buildings, but it's the loss of the systems, the loss of the knowledge, the loss of the books, the desks, the chairs, you know, you think about everything that it takes to build up a school. If a school is bombed, it's not just the building, it's everything that contributes to the learning environment. I mean, there's an incredible persistence and resilience, which is what you see in Amjad schools. There's, I think, over 38 ,000, certainly, you know, nearly 40 ,000 high schoolers this year were taking the university entrance exam in these terrible conditions, online, in the heat, with the bombings, with everything, because they're so hungry for a future.

25:30Yeah. And there was a recent UN inquiry by the Human Rights Commission into the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children by the Israeli military. They published a report a few weeks ago. So the Israeli government has called this inquiry a libelous sham. But what were the main findings? Annie, the main findings were that Israel's attacks on Gaza have been a comprehensive attack on Palestinian childhood. We've had over 21 ,000 children killed. In many cases, targeted attacks where Israel knew that there were children present, for instance, in homes. The very high numbers of injured, over 44 ,000 children injured, many of them amputees, life changing injuries, loss of vision.

26:22and more broadly just that the fabric of their lives the fabric of their childhood has been targeted by this war has been effectively destroyed that they haven't had a childhood and I think that's one of the things that makes the pictures the videos we see of Amjad's school so both beautiful and heartbreaking because there's a momentary escape and joy there, a return to childhood. Coming up, Amjad's fight to keep his swimming pool open.

27:24The atmosphere is fun and really really lovely for that children get to experience something that feels like a normal summer vibes again.

27:40But for me it's more personal. My father loved the sea and loved swimming. He was the one who taught me how to swim when I was so young. This is probably the first summer that I truly feel his absence. for me being here brings me back to that memories with him and I wish he could see this place.