• ON Saturday August 26 the Gaza Swimming Carnival will be celebrated on the beaches of Gaza.

This year we’ll be bringing the festival to London. At 9.30am our local Swim With Gaza group will be meeting outside the Parliament Hill lido for a swim.

Groups from London to Florida to Kuala Lumpur to Cape Town will all also be taking part. Each group shall become part of live streamed video sent back to Gaza.

We have a fundraising goal of £5,000 to fund swimming lessons for 100 children in Gaza.

The festival has consistently been a day of fun and happiness at the beach for the children of Gaza.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, millions of people in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank “struggle to live in dignity under Israeli occupation”.

With the academic journal Frontiers in Psychiatry finding 90 per cent of children and adolescents in the Gaza Strip have experienced trauma, our campaign focuses on children in Gaza hoping to learn how to swim.

Our event here in London has three aims. First, to send solidarity to the people of Gaza from around the world.

Secondly, to raise funds for swimming lessons for Palestinian children.

And thirdly, to raise awareness for the struggle of Palestinians in Gaza to live a normal life within our local community.

Often people in Gaza feel isolated and forgotten in the hard lives they live.

We want to get involved with this moment with them and hope to show them there are people across the world who care and are thinking about them.

PAUL O’BRIEN, GILL JACOBS, SARAH PILLAI & LUCA SALICE