Three years of war have destroyed almost every playground in Gaza. For Hala, an orphaned child, a swimming club on the beach offers a rare chance to escape the realities of war. The club was set up by Amjed Tantesh, who once hoped to train swimmers for Palestine\u2019s Olympic team. Now, in a pool built from the rubble, he\u2019s offering free lessons to children affected by war. The Guardian follows Hala and her brother Amir as they attend their first lesson, confront their fear of the sea and find a place where they can simply be children again<\/p>\n
Amjed Tantesh, who features in this film, has also worked as a journalist for the Guardian and other outlets. His niece, Seham Tantesh, reports for the Guardian from Gaza<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three years of war have destroyed almost every playground in Gaza. For Hala, an orphaned child, a swimming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":632019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-632018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}