Sheffield PSC’s partners in Gaza organised the event, and shared photos of more than 20 children with Palestinian flags and posters running through the rubble.
This comes ahead of the eighth annual ‘Small Park Big Run’ this weekend (June 22 and 23), which aims to raise awareness and funds for Palestine.
Jonny Feldman, who started the event in 2017, said: “In the past, the children … in Khan Younis, Gaza, have done a run to coincide with the run we do in Meersbrook Park.
“We never expected they could do something this year. The centre is destroyed and families are displaced. And then we got these pictures.
“[It is] amazing that in the midst of all what they have to go through they can organise a solidarity run.”
The Never Stop Dreaming Children’s Centre was set up by Sheffield PSC and their Gaza-based partners, Middle East Children’s Alliance, around five years ago.
A further initiative, Qayis Centre for Psychological and Community Support (previously Khuza’s Play and Heal Project), was then developed to provide “much needed care and respite” to children in Gaza.
Funding, in part raised by Small Park Big Run, saw the centre completed in 2022, but it has since been destroyed amid the ongoing Israel-Gaza war (also called the Israel-Hamas war).
The centre’s original opening, scheduled for November 2018, was delayed due to Israeli air strikes in Gaza that year.
Sheffield PSC paid for rent, furniture, day trips, books and entertainment, and even a mobile library at the centre.
The healing centre’s name changed in 2022 in memory of Qayis El-Farra, a young Palestinian who was born and raised in Sheffield, and sadly passed away from cancer in 2021.
Small Park Big Run takes place from midday on Saturday for 24 hours, with people able to join at any time, and events surrounding the theme ‘land and food’ happening alongside it.
