'We Just Want to Play': Gaza Children Grounded by Israel's Kite Warning
Ten-year-old Ahmed Hamdouna has already lost his home, his streets, and most of what childhood usually promises. Now, with a single Israeli warning, he has lost the kites he built from scraps of plastic and sticks.
“My father stopped me from flying my kites because of the occupation’s threats,” Ahmed, now displaced to Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, told AFP. “I felt heartbroken after spending so much time collecting sticks and nylon, only for the occupation to prevent us from playing with them. We are just young children. They destroyed our home and our whole neighborhood — what more do they want?”
His small ritual of joy had become a symbol of something larger. Israel has warned it will step up military operations in Gaza if kites continue to land on the Israeli side of the border. The military accuses Hamas of cynically using children, and says the kites could pose a threat — particularly after a wave of incendiary kites and balloons sparked fires in Israeli farmland in previous years.
In recent days, a series of kites has drifted across the border into southern Israeli communities that remain deeply shaken by the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas has denied responsibility. No explosives were detected, though at least one kite carried a political message.
On Wednesday, an official of the U.S.-led Board of Peace overseeing the ceasefire plan in the territory said: “All militant activity in Gaza must stop, including the flying of kites.” The official added: “Israel, too, must comply with the ceasefire.”
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said popular committees in Gaza’s displacement camps were trying to prevent children from flying kites, fearing they could be targeted by the Israeli military.
Ahmed says he is now afraid to play, but cannot understand why the Israeli military would be “afraid of kites when they are just paper and string.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “I just want to play like children everywhere else.”
‘A sense of freedom’
For Gaza’s children, kite-building had become one of the last inexpensive forms of joy in a landscape of rubble.
“There are no toys here, no amusement parks, not even a football to play with. The kite is the only thing we can make with our own hands that makes us happy when we fly it in the sky,” said 11-year-old Yamen al-Mubayyed, also displaced to Deir el-Balah.
“My friends and I get together and make them using pieces of wood we collect from destroyed houses, along with paper and string. We glue them together using flour and water, then go to the sea to fly them.”
Yamen said even the buzz of Israeli surveillance drones overhead did not stop him. “It is the only thing that makes us feel that we children are alive and gives us a sense of freedom.”
The warnings come as Israel continues to carry out attacks in Gaza, saying it is targeting militants despite a U.S.-backed ceasefire that took effect in October. Israeli army chief Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said on Tuesday he would continue demilitarizing Gaza “using all necessary means.”
For parents, the once-harmless activity now carries impossible weight.
Akram Abu Shurkh, 30, said he had forbidden his children from making kites, but felt he had “killed the joy in their eyes” in doing so.
“These are children who do not understand military calculations. They only see it as a game and a way to release their energy,” he said. “But I see death in the touch of the string and the flying of the kite.”
In southern Gaza, 34-year-old Umm Moaz Huwayla said her heart raced with worry every time her children went outside with their kites, yet she could not bring herself to stop them.
“The occupation wants to kill the joy in their hearts,” she said. “They are not asking for much, only to live their childhood, even with a piece of string and a sheet of paper.”
Joy caught in the ceasefire’s fault lines
The debate over kites may seem small against the broader backdrop of the war, but it highlights a fragile reality: in a place where even a child’s toy can be read as a security threat, the ceasefire itself depends on how the two sides define “militant activity.”
For Ahmed, the loss is not about politics. It is about the sky above a tent camp being off-limits, and the simple thrill of watching something he made catch the wind.
“I just want to play like children everywhere else,” he repeated.