Mohammed al-Jakhbeer and Abed Allah Enshasy sprint along narrow walls. They somersault off concrete pillars and land in the deep sand.

“At first people didn’t accept us,” Enshasy, 23, explains. People would say: “You jump like monkeys and you climb buildings like thieves. What are you doing?”

The brand of urban-obstacle-course gymnastics they practice may be at odds with the socially conservative mores of Khan Yunis — the southern Gaza town and periodic war zone that they call home — but it is their chosen form of self-expression. Calling themselves the Gaza Parkour Team and practicing with a rotating crew of like-minded edgy acrobats, they spend their days rehearsing routines and teaching the sport to schoolchildren. The local graveyard serves as their practice arena. As Enshasy puts it, “The dead people don’t mind.”

Among the headstones of local dignitaries and graffiti commemorating militants are bullet holes from battles between Palestinian factions and Israeli troops, who were once based in the former Jewish settlement that adjoins the cemetery. “I have witnessed war, invasion and killing,” Enshasy says. “When I was a kid and I saw these things, blood and injuries, I didn’t know what it all meant.”

He and Jakhbeer, 22, are wary of straying too near the Hamas training zone, just as they are wary of leaving their homes when Israeli drones appear in the sky over their cinder-block refugee camp. They prefer the comparative safety of their daring leaps and bone-shattering landings. They believe that, one day, their ticket out of Gaza will be written by parkour.

Parkour originated in the suburbs of Paris and is a corruption of the French word “parcours,” meaning route or journey. In a very literal sense, the sport is about overcoming barriers, living beyond the restraints of physics. It inspires a philosophical outlook on life that mirrors the actions of its athletes.

According to Jakhbeer, parkour helps untangle the “anger and depression” that comes with living where they do. Indeed, nowhere could a philosophy of escape and freedom have a greater resonance than in the narrow, politically and militarily confined Gaza Strip, home to a boxed-in population of 1.7 million Palestinians.

As it so happens, the dense urban setting is perfectly suited for the activity, a fact Enshasy realized immediately upon watching the famous documentary “Jump London” on television a few years ago. He recruited Jakhbeer, and needing no expensive equipment and aided by the Internet, they picked up moves quickly, discovering a talent for fluidity through extreme motions. Jakhbeer, a basketball player, does better on the jumps, while Enshasy regards tumbling as his forte.

The sandy soil of their training grounds slows down their routines at points where they would prefer firmer surfaces for jumping-off, but it also helps to break bad falls. High sand dunes are also ideal for spectacular leaps, which feature in the videos that Jakhbeer — who studied film editing at college — puts together with footage shot on borrowed cellphone cameras.

Both are confident of their abilities, but they have never been able to test themselves against other parkour devotees outside Gaza. A cheap Korean computer in a pink-washed back room in Enshasy’s home is their only conduit to the outside world. Both spend hours each day online, their quick eyes and fingers rarely leaving the keyboard and screen.

Through a Facebook page they chat, mostly in Arabic, with enthusiasts from Kuwait, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt. A commenter for a recent video singles out Enshasy — “the dude with the long hair” — for having “awesome tumbling skill.” Another writes in Arabic, “May God bring my level to their level.”

A third commenter, this one in English, writes: “Amazing guys! You got so much better from last year. I hope there will be peace between us one day.” Another, also in English, writes simply, “I love it.” Both are signed “Peace from Israel!”

Though the only Israelis Jakhbeer and Enshasy have ever met are settlers and soldiers, at whom they threw stones as children, they say they can separate their feelings about Israel’s politics from its people, to whom they bear no ill will. They see themselves as athletes first and not political figures of any sort.

Because they speak only Arabic, they are limited in how much they can interact with those outside the Middle East. But parkour is a visual spectacle with sequences that can be broken down into individual moves. So while they are studying a YouTube video or a series of stepped walls on the Gaza seafront, there is a rat-tat-tat exchange in Arabic and broken English between them, as they evaluate obstacles and identify moves — “back flip,” “amaamiya” [front], “cat leap” and “jidar” [wall].

“When I watch the people who do parkour outside, I’ve never seen anybody who does it better than us,” says Jakhbeer, a burst of electronic music from his headphones indicating that even as he speaks, most of his attention is directed toward the latest video that he has found on the Internet.

Even though they cannot easily reach the outside world, sometimes it intrudes, unbidden. At one point, Jakhbeer tears off his headphones with news that the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has been killed. For a moment sport is put aside, and the youngsters and adults gather around the screen in Enshasy’s home, as confused by the implications of this passing as the rest of the world.

One obstacle to their ambition to be professional athletes is pressure to get a job, not easy in an area of high unemployment. Jakhbeer, in particular, says his family is nagging him to start bringing money in. For the moment he has managed to resist and to continue devoting himself to parkour.

His immediate goal is to secure entry to a parkour competition in Miami next spring, the Cross Urban Scramble, which would transform their international profile. They seize upon the arrival of English-speaking journalists to get a proper translation of the competition rules, nervous that they might have missed the deadline to submit a video — they hadn’t — and that two people might not be enough for a team. (It was.)

The real uncertainty is whether they will be able to leave Gaza. Jakhbeer once lived in Saudi Arabia, so he has travel documents. But Enshasy has never left the coastal strip, and the bureaucratic and financial hurdles are many.

The gateway to Egypt is barely five miles down the road, but there is no way of knowing whether fate will allow them passage.

Miami seems a long way away.