The four teenagers, who have spent their entire lives in the Gaza Strip, hope to represent Palestine in world swimming competitions in Asia later this year.

While their chosen sport is swimming, they face an unusual array of hurdles.

Gaza has only one swimming pool, half the regulation size and usually crowded with paddling children. And even the diesel needed to heat the frigid winter waters needs to be smuggled into the besieged territory.

"There's no shame in poverty ... but our economic circumstances are difficult, and that affects the level of training," says 16-year-old Iyad Shamaa, who dropped out of school three years ago to help support his family.

The walls of the cramped house where he lives with his nine siblings were cracked and damaged during last winter's Gaza war and his father's carpentry shop was shut down after Israel and Egypt closed Gaza's borders in 2007.

But every day he walks the 3km to the Nama swimming club, an oasis in the crowded camp, to try to carve seconds off his time for the 50-meter freestyle.

He and another swimmer hope to compete in Singapore at the first Youth Olympic Games in August. Two other swimmers plan to participate in the Asian Games in China in November.

"I'm very happy because I will represent Palestine," says Khaled al-Bursh, 16, who hopes to attend the China games.

"We know that the others have much better facilities and clubs and pools ... But we are still determined to compete and to win."

They have a long road ahead of them.

The Gaza Strip, an impoverished territory of 1.5 million people, has been under a crippling blockade since June 2007, when the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in a week of bloody street battles.

The ability of Palestinians to leave the territory is heavily restricted, with Israel mostly limiting permits to humanitarian cases and Egypt only rarely opening its Rafah crossing with Gaza.

The four hope to coordinate their exit through Egypt with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, but there are no guarantees.

The pool in Jabaliya is less than half the regulation size for the Olympics and most of the time is filled with children. The team going to China plans to use an Olympic-size pool in Sweden for a month before the games.

"A pool built according to international specifications would require huge capabilities, much more than we have in Gaza," says Mahmud Shamaa, 28, the coach of the team and distant relative of Iyad.

"The circumstances are tough," he adds.

The pool, built shortly before Hamas seized power, is heated 14 hours a day with diesel smuggled through tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egypt border.

If the athletes make it to the games they could have their first face-to-face encounter with Israelis, a thought that stirs disgust in many from their generation, which has come of age during years of war and strife.