Nusseirat (Gaza Strip): "When I grow up I want to be a doctor and make the Palestinian people better," says Ranim, a pretty 11-year-old girl in a new Palestinian summer camp movement, as she shows off a polystyrene model of children clearing litter off the streets of her town.

"My dream is to be a martyr," pipes up Shilafa, a feisty 12-year-old girl in a Muslim headscarf who, before announcing her death wish, had just sung a ditty to her classmates in the psychological support group about becoming a nurse.

Their supervisor, Mohammed Boreis, looks momentarily flustered, but then shrugs.

The aim of the 'Future of Youth' school, which he runs in this Gaza Strip refugee camp, is to tackle such differences in attitude, by trying to give kids back their childhood and draw them away from their morbid daily lives.

The children's pictures hanging on the concrete walls of the summer camp perfectly illustrate the challenge facing the 19-year-old camp director and his young staff of 11.

One drawing shows ruined buildings, an Israeli soldier firing a machinegun across red-ink razor wire while stone-throwing demonstrators burn Israeli flags and a bulldozer crushes olive groves.

Others are simple sketches of keys, the symbol of refugees driven from their homes two generations back, while one shows a knife with a Star of David insignia stabbing a bleeding Koran.

"Of course we talk about the Israelis, the kids know that they rape our land, but we try to get them away from that reality, give them an escape so they can be creative children," says Mohammed.

He tells them that becoming doctors and architects, by healing and building, is as much a part of resistance to occupation as the much-photographed kids lobbing stones at Israeli tanks.

He says free expression of their darker feelings in art and drama classes helps that sense of release, pointing also to typical children's pictures of rabbits and flowers and sketches on the themes of freedom of education and expression.

In the drama class, two boys act out an argument between a father who wants his son to drop classes and work, and his son who expounds his right to an education and childhood.

While not Oscar-winning performances, Mohammed says they help reinforce the idea that the kids have a right to be kids, not fighters.

Ibrahim Abu Sheikh of the youth ministry says various ministries, NGOs and UNICEF co- ordinated a charter for the camps to avoid the militant influence some had developed in previous years.

"Before there were 300 camps and three tried to train kids to use weapons. The Israelis took this weak spot and exploited it," he said, recalling news footage of kids being trained by Islamic Jihad radicals in handling Kalashnikov assault rifles.

Last month, Israel said it found a photograph of an infant dressed as a suicide bomber in the home of a wanted Palestinian militant in the West Bank town of Hebron.

With a new streamlined organisation of 80 camps, run by volunteers, as promised financial support has yet to be delivered, Abu Sheikh is proud of his charter, promoting human values, freedom of speech and tolerance to kids who have grown up with hatred, violence and poverty.

In the Nusseirat camp, a rented house with a yard that takes in 80 kids for two weeks, three times a summer, children get a chance to indulge in games, make models, paint and play in a band whose instruments they made themselves out of tin cans and scrap wood.

In a bid to foster a sense of community, the band strikes up a scratchy version of the Palestinian national anthem, "My country".

In the psychological support group, Shilafa tries to justify her dream of dying fighting Israelis. "It would be nice to be a nurse, but the Israelis always put obstacles in our way, they keep us at roadblocks so we can't get to school and study. That's why it's better to be a martyr," she says.

Mohammed tries to divert his kids away from the harsh world outside in Gaza's streets, where people crane their necks nervously as an Israeli helicopter buzzes overhead and almost every street sports angry, militaristic graffiti.

The kids close their eyes and concentrate on forgetting, or write down their dream for a career on a piece of paper cut into shape of a fruit and pinned to dry twigs stuck in a bucket of sand, the so-called 'dream tree'.

For this summer at least, the kids of Nusseirat are learning about human rights, not killing, in this camp.