There is something profoundly unsettling about a military power becoming alarmed by children flying kites:

In Gaza, where childhood has already been stripped of so many of its ordinary meanings, even a kite has now entered the vocabulary of warfare. In August 2026, several kites drifted from Gaza toward Israeli communities near the border. Israel’s own military reported that the kites it recovered carried no suspicious material and posed no danger. Yet Israeli leaders responded by treating their appearance as a potential act of war. Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that a balloon would be treated like a kite and a kite like a drone, “with or without explosives.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz subsequently warned that those responsible could be targeted and that populations could be evacuated from areas identified as launch sites.

By 25 August, Palestinian committees in Gaza were asking parents to prevent their children from flying kites, not because kites themselves had become dangerous, but because the children holding their strings might become targets. One mother told Reuters that her ten-year-old son had always flown kites during the summer but that she would no longer allow him to do so.

The gravity of that moment

A child living among tents and rubble must now calculate whether sending a piece of plastic bag into the sky could endanger his family or neighbourhood. This is larger than a story about kites. It is about the progressive securitisation of Palestinian existence.

A child living among tents and rubble must now calculate whether sending a piece of plastic bag into the sky could endanger his family or neighbourhood. This is larger than a story about kites. It is about the progressive securitisation of Palestinian existence.

There is, of course, a history that cannot simply be erased. During Gaza’s Great March of Return beginning in 2018, incendiary kites and balloons were used by Palestinians and caused fires in agricultural fields inside Israel. Activists have examined those incendiary devices as an........

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