Mohamed Majed and Tarek Chouiref
27 August 2026•Update: 27 August 2026
A Palestinian child in the Gaza Strip tore apart his kites one by one, crying outside the tent where he lives after Israeli threats to intensify attacks and force residents from parts of the enclave over kites reaching nearby Israeli territory.
A video widely circulated on social media showed the boy angrily ripping the kites apart before sitting beside his tent in tears.
“To please Netanyahu, to please Katz, to please Trump, they want to deprive us of the thing we love,” the child said as he destroyed them. “By God, my heart is breaking.”
The boy lives in a displacement tent in Gaza, where children have turned to simple forms of recreation amid widespread displacement and destruction caused by Israel’s war.
‘The thing we love’
For children living amid tents and ruins, flying kites has become one of the few readily available forms of play.
But the pastime became the focus of Israeli security threats after several kites were reported to have reached areas near Gaza in recent days.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened Sunday to intensify attacks and force Palestinians to evacuate areas of Gaza if kites, balloons and drones continued to reach Israeli territory.
Katz said Israel would treat a kite like a drone “whether it carries explosives or not” and ordered the army to respond to further launches.
The Israeli army, however, said after examining four kites recovered near Gaza that no suspicious materials were found and that they had at no point posed a danger to the public.
It has provided no public evidence to substantiate claims that Hamas was behind the kites reaching Israeli territory.
Threats reach Gaza’s children
Hamas said the kites were toys flown by children and accused Israel of using them as a pretext for further escalation against Palestinians.
The UN Human Rights Office on Tuesday also criticized Israeli threats to evacuate areas of Gaza over the kites, saying such threats were unacceptable in light of Israel’s obligations under international law to protect civilians.
The Israeli warnings have meanwhile prompted local groups in Gaza to urge families to stop children from flying kites, fearing that stray kites carried by the wind toward Israeli territory could be used as grounds for renewed attacks.
For the boy, the Israeli threats turned a simple pastime into something he felt forced to give up.
After tearing apart the last of his kites, he sat beside his tent and cried.
Since a US-brokered ceasefire took effect on Oct. 10, 2025, Israeli attacks have killed 1,296 Palestinians and injured 4,296 others, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed more than 73,000 people and injured over 174,000 others in its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.