Gaza's Makeshift Swim School: Reclaiming Childhood on the Beach at Deir al Balah

On the battered shoreline of Deir al Balah, where rubble meets the Mediterranean and childhood has been under siege for nearly three years, a South African sports heart cannot look away. Swimming coach Amjed Tantesh and a band of unpaid volunteers have carved five makeshift sea pools from sandbags and wreckage, handing hundreds of Gaza’s children a few stolen hours of freestyle, friendship and air that does not taste of fear.

Makeshift Pools, Stolen Childhoods: Gaza’s Beach Swimming School and the Echo That Reaches South African Shores

Deir al Balah, Gaza – 30 July 2026 — Nearly three years of Israeli bombardment have stripped hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s children of homes, classrooms and any safe place to play. In the central Gaza coastal stretch around Deir al Balah, swimming coach Amjed Tantesh has answered that void the only way he knows how: by rebuilding the water itself. With tonnes of rubble shifted by hand and sandbags stacked into walls, Tantesh and dozens of volunteers have fashioned five sea pools on the beach, tarpaulins stretched for shade, so that girls and boys who have known little but displacement can learn to float, doggy-paddle and take their first proper strokes.

A United Nations survey in March found that 96 percent of children in Gaza felt death was imminent. Against that statistic, the sight of delighted youngsters filling these pools every afternoon is not a soft feature story. It is resistance measured in freestyle lengths. For South African fans who grew up watching Penny Heyns rewrite the record books and who still cheer Tatjana Smith and Chad le Clos, the parallel is impossible to ignore: sport, even in its most basic form, remains one of the last languages of hope when everything else has been shelled into silence.

Five Pools Carved from Rubble and Resolve

Everything at the Deir al Balah site has been done by hand. Very little heavy machinery remains functional across Gaza, so volunteers have moved tonnes of rubble, filled endless sandbags to form protective walls, and excavated sand to deepen the pools enough for proper lessons. The string of five makeshift sea pools sits on the beaches of central Gaza, drawing children “like huge magnets,” in Tantesh’s own words. Mornings are reserved as free classes for children whose parents were killed in Israeli attacks. Afternoons the pools open to everyone, and they stay packed with youngsters desperate for motion that is not flight.

So far, 700 children have passed through six weeks of classes. Tantesh wants thousands more before the summer ends, but that hinges on funding to pay teachers who currently work for nothing and to cover the most basic expenses. The lessons allow a few hundred girls and boys at a time to reclaim fragments of childhood in a territory with no playgrounds, almost no formal education, and the constant dread of further strikes. Israeli attacks have continued to hit multiple areas across Gaza, including tents sheltering displaced families in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, leaving more children killed and wounded even as these beach sessions unfold.

For a South African audience raised on the National Sea Rescue Institute’s water-safety drives and Swimming South Africa’s learn-to-swim programmes in under-resourced communities, the method feels familiar even if the stakes are unimaginably higher. Drowning remains a leading cause of accidental death among children in South Africa; the same logic that sends NSRI instructors into townships is the logic Tantesh is applying on a shoreline still within range of artillery.

Amjed Tantesh: From Olympic Dream to Beachfront Lifeline

Amjed Tantesh founded Gaza’s first swimming academy more than two decades ago. The original spark was equal parts hope and hard arithmetic. Palestine made its Olympic debut at the Atlanta Games in 1996, the same Games where South Africa’s Penny Heyns stormed to double gold in the 100m and 200m breaststroke. That debut gave athletes from Gaza their first real sight of the world’s biggest stage and gave Tantesh a mission. “I wanted to be at the Olympics, but I started as a professional swimmer at a very late age. So I decided to achieve my dream through a new generation,” he has explained.

There was also a grim local reality. Each summer brought drowning deaths along the coast. Families flocked to the beach, yet few people could swim and his local stretch had no lifeguards. Teaching children to swim would keep them safer and could eventually produce lifeguards of their own. Early on, the biggest obstacle was parental fear: “People were terrified by water, the sea looked like a monster to them as it consumed dozens of people annually.” Children first learned inside Gaza’s port, where breakwaters tamed the waves. Later came a series of coastal pools in which roughly 11,000 people learned to swim. The largest, built with rubble from homes bombed by Israel in 2014, stretched more than 1,000 square metres.

Israeli attacks since 2023 razed every one of those pools, killed tens of swimming students and at least six coaches, and injured countless more. Restarting looked almost impossible. “I only had the sea, but the sea is dangerous even during summer. You have jellyfish, you have high waves, strong currents, rocks,” Tantesh said. Yet he mobilised volunteers this summer and began again on the Deir al Balah sand. The first person the project helped, he admits, was himself: “It has given me a great feeling of happiness and recovery. I am alive again.”

Alma, Maryam, Laila: Names Behind the 96 Percent

Alma Shabat is 13. She saw her mother killed in an Israeli strike in May. After three weeks of classes her favourite stroke is freestyle; she has made new friends, shed her fear of the waves and the open sea, and speaks with a clarity that should shame the world. “Swimming gives me a chance to escape the war, and the worries I live with. Coming to the beach is a beautiful and enjoyable experience.”

Maryam al Musri is 10 and lost her father in the war. “Being here allows me to train, play and breathe fresh air, away from the tents,” she says. The tents she mentions are the crowded, hot, noisy camps into which survivors have been crammed across just a third of prewar Gaza, often without adequate water or sanitation.

Laila Qahman is 14. She lost her seven-year-old brother when a mosque near where he was playing was bombed. She still dreams of becoming a pharmacist. “I come here every other day because it makes me feel like I’m living my life and enjoying my time, instead of staying in the tent listening to the sounds of shelling and living with fear and sadness. Before I learned how to swim, I was a little afraid of the sea and did not have the courage to go into the water. Now, I feel much more confident and no longer feel afraid when I swim.”

These are not anonymous statistics. They are the human face of a UN finding that 96 percent of Gaza’s children recently felt death was closing in. One in ten of the prewar population has been killed or injured in Israeli attacks; thousands more are believed buried under rubble. Gaza now carries the highest concentration of child amputees anywhere on earth. A UN commission put it in stark language: disability among Palestinian children has ceased to be an individual medical condition and has become a defining demographic reality. Nearly 700,000 school-age children have had no proper schooling for three years; almost every school building is damaged or destroyed, and only a minority reach the makeshift tent schools run by aid groups.

Brotherhood, Blood and the Cost of Coaching

Tantesh carries his own irreparable loss. His older brother Bahjat, a karate champion, was killed in an Israeli attack last year as the brothers fled their family home under evacuation orders. “Bahjat was the one that taught me swimming in the first place, then inspired me to pursue sporting excellence as a young man. To have him die in my arms was the worst thing imaginable.” That sentence alone explains why a man keeps stacking sandbags while the sky remains unsafe.

At least six of his coaches are dead. Tens of his former students will never swim again. The original academy’s infrastructure is gone. And still the mornings open for bereaved children and the afternoons fill with whoever can reach the sand. Tantesh has also worked as a journalist for the Guardian and other outlets; his niece Seham Tantesh reports for the Guardian from inside Gaza, which is how much of this testimony has reached the outside world. The family is both chronicling and living the catastrophe.

South Africans understand, in their own historical register, what it means when sport becomes the last public square. The 1995 Rugby World Cup, the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations triumph on home soil, the 2010 FIFA World Cup — each was sold, correctly, as more than a trophy. They were proof that a broken society could still gather around a ball or a pool and remember itself. What Tantesh is doing on the Deir al Balah beach is that same instinct under fire. It is not diplomacy. It is not a ceasefire. It is a coach refusing to let an entire generation forget what water feels like when it is not a threat.

Why South African Swimming Must Pay Attention

Swimming South Africa and SASCOC oversee a high-performance system that has produced Penny Heyns, Chad le Clos, Tatjana Smith and a deep Commonwealth Games pedigree. That system also carries a developmental mandate: learn-to-swim programmes, transformation targets, and partnerships with bodies such as the NSRI to cut drowning rates in communities where pools are scarce and the sea is both playground and hazard. The Gaza project is the extreme edge of the same continuum. When Tantesh says the pools give children “a rare chance to enjoy, relax and reclaim part of their stolen childhood,” every coach who has ever pulled a nervous township child through their first unassisted width knows the sentence in their bones.

South Africa’s government and much of its public have been sharply critical of the conduct of the war in Gaza; the case brought at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention remains a defining foreign-policy marker. That political context matters, but the sporting one is more immediate for readers of these pages. A generation of Palestinian children is growing up without schools, without playgrounds, and with a UN-documented expectation of imminent death. Five sandbag pools will not reverse that. They do, however, prove that the muscle memory of organised sport — coaching, progression, safety, joy — can be rebuilt from rubble when the will exists.

The practical needs are concrete. Teachers are unpaid. Basic expenses are uncovered. Tantesh has the sea, the volunteers, the sandbags and the children. He does not yet have the resources to scale from 700 participants to the thousands he believes he can reach this summer. For Swimming South Africa, for university clubs, for the NSRI’s education arms, and for ordinary South African swim parents who pack kit bags every Saturday, the question is whether solidarity can travel as far as technique once did from Atlanta 1996 to the rest of the world.

Reclaiming the Water, Reclaiming the Self

Tantesh’s verdict on the work is unadorned: “It’s a rare chance to enjoy, relax and reclaim part of their stolen childhood.” Alma Shabat is no longer afraid of the open sea. Laila Qahman feels confident in the water and briefly free of the soundtrack of shelling. Maryam al Musri can breathe air that is not trapped under canvas. These are small sentences until you place them against three years without formal school, against the highest child-amputee density on the planet, against a March survey in which 96 percent of children believed death was at the door.

The same Mediterranean that once drowned the unprepared is being turned, pool by hand-dug pool, into a classroom and a clinic for the spirit. South African sport has always claimed that its highest purpose is bigger than medals — that it can stitch a country together, teach discipline, and offer dignity where politics has failed. On the beach at Deir al Balah those claims are being stress-tested in real time. Amjed Tantesh, mourning the karate-champion brother who first taught him to swim, is not waiting for permission from history. He is filling sandbags, marking out lanes in the surf, and daring 700 children at a time to remember they are still allowed to be children.

The war has not paused for these lessons. Strikes still land on tents in al-Mawasi and beyond. The coaches still work for free. The funding gap still sits between a few hundred swimmers and the thousands Tantesh knows are waiting further up the sand. Yet every morning the bereaved arrive, and every afternoon the pools fill again. For anyone who has ever stood on a South African pool deck and watched a nervous beginner finally trust the water, the meaning requires no translation.

By Dante Williams, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Reporting is based on sources cited in the article.