Where a playground once stood in disrepair, between the municipality and the school of a small village in Palestine, a free access community skate park now stands. The majority of the children of Jayyous, a village in the northwest of the West Bank, are rolling around their new play space, while others celebrate on a terrace overlooking the park, singing and dancing to a local party song.

“Skateboarding is amazing. I feel like a bird when I’m skating,” Yasmeen Foqha, 15, told Al-Monitor, between laps around the park.

The 650-square-meter (7,000-square-foot) skate park was constructed in September by the British charity SkatePal with a team of international volunteers, alongside local partner SkateQilya. SkatePal has been operating within Palestine since 2013 to promote the benefits of skateboarding in a region where cultural, educational and sporting opportunities are limited. Their last project was a 700-square-meter skate park in the village of Asira al-Shamaliya, just north of the West Bank city of Nablus. SkateQilya is a youth empowerment program based in Qalqilya, west of Jayyous and bordering the Israeli wall. Through their summer camps, they use skateboarding to teach leadership skills and community building to young people in the West Bank. The organization is primarily funded through the American nonprofit Playgrounds for Palestine as well as individual donors.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Jayyous is home to just under 4,000 people with half of the population under 25. The village is in close proximity to the Israeli-West Bank wall and directly affected by frequent raids by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Only one hour into the opening of the park, word spread that the IDF was in the village. A group of children started running toward the center of town to see where the soldiers were, while other park visitors and skaters stayed within the safety of the park.