[News] Gaza’s Kites Demand Global Solidarity

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-wind-from-the-rubble-why-gazas-kites-demand-global-solidarity/>
The Wind from the Rubble: Why Gaza’s Kites Demand Global SolidarityAugust
25, 2026
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Children in Gaza flew kites carrying the colors of the Palestinian flag.
(Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

*By Iqbal Jassat <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/iqbal-jassat>*

Treating kites flown by children as military threats represents a dangerous
escalation in the normalization of asymmetric warfare.

High above the concrete ruins of the Gaza Strip, the sky occasionally fills
with color. In a place defined by Israel’s inhumane Occupation, blockades
and airstrikes, children piece together paper, plastic, and sticks to build
simple kites. Yet, even this universal symbol of childhood has been pulled
into the arena of war.

When makeshift toys are classified as weapons and met with military
airstrikes, the international community cannot remain silent. The world
must urgently mobilize to protect Gaza’s children and defend their
fundamental right to a childhood.

On Sunday, Israeli airstrikes targeting central Gaza struck a building in
az-Zawayda, killing three people—including four-year-old Mohammad
Abdel-Salam Taha. The justification offered by the occupying forces for
these deadly operations? A security directive ordering that paper kites,
balloons, and makeshift toys flown by children be treated with the same
lethal force as military combat drones.

For South Africans, this language is chillingly familiar. It echoes the
dark eras of our own past when the apartheid regime classified
schoolchildren marching in Soweto as existential threats to the state. When
the simple act of play is designated an act of war, the international
community cannot look away.

Mainstream media houses, civil society, and ordinary citizens must urgently
mobilize. We must defend the children of Gaza and protect their absolute
right to a childhood.

The decision by Israeli authorities to elevate kites to the status of
weapons of war represents a terrifying new threshold in the normalization
of asymmetric warfare.

Israeli military sources themselves acknowledged that multiple recovered
kites found near the border carried no explosives or suspicious materials,
posing zero physical danger to the public.

Yet, the settler colonial regime’s war criminal leader Benjamin Netanyahu
issued an ultimatum: halt the kites within three days or face intensified
air assaults and mass civilian evacuation.

By treating a child’s toy under the same strategic doctrine as an advanced
surveillance drone, the occupying military creates a legal loophole to
justify dropping high-explosive munitions on civilian neighborhoods.

The catastrophic result is what we witnessed on Sunday: shrapnel and flying
concrete tearing through the makeshift refuge of a four-year-old toddler.
Mohammad Taha had no understanding of geopolitics or border fences. He is
merely the latest casualty of a system that views the mere presence of
Palestinian children as a demographic threat.

As senior Hamas official Basem Naim noted, these children are not launching
military operations; they are flying kites “in search of their innocent
childhood amid the rubble.”

As South Africans, our history gives us a unique moral lens—and a profound
responsibility—to call this what it is: systematic oppression disguised as
state security.

We know what it meant when the apartheid regime’s administrative power
controlled every exit, cut off water and electricity, and restricted the
entry of basic humanitarian medical supplies. We understand the
psychological toll of a system designed to make a population feel entirely
disposable.

When even the sky is transformed into a designated free-fire zone, the
final sanctuary for psychological escape is stripped away from Gaza’s youth.

The international community often speaks of international law in clinical,
detached terms. But international humanitarian frameworks, including the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child, explicitly guarantee children the
right to leisure, play, and a safe environment.

Remaining silent and continuing to support Israel’s war crimes, as the
Trump administration and many global powers do, makes them complicit in the
systematic erasure of these fundamental rights. The supply of coal by South
Africa falls in the same category and has to be halted as a matter of
urgency.

Indeed, this crisis places a heavy burden on mainstream media, particularly
within South Africa. For too long, global news networks have relied heavily
on sanitized military press releases that obscure human suffering behind
terms like “targeted operations” or “retaliatory measures”. Journalists
have an ethical obligation to cut through the clinical rhetoric.

We must state clearly that a paper kite is not a drone, a child is not a
combatant, and a warehouse in az-Zawayda is not a legitimate military
fortress.

Our own local institutions must also shake off their inertia. From Cape
Town to Johannesburg, South African journalists, artists, and activists
have previously gathered to fly kites in the colors of the Palestinian flag
at popular beaches like Muizenberg, sending a message of shared hope and
resistance across the oceans.

But symbolic gestures alone will not stop the bombs.

Mainstream media platforms must serve as regular amplifiers for grassroots
activism, ensuring that the stories of families like Mohammad Taha’s are
front-page news, not buried footnotes.

The winds blowing through the ruins of Gaza carry more than just paper and
string; they carry a universal cry for freedom, peace, and the basic right
to exist without terror.

A child flying a kite is not an act of war. It is an act of survival. It is
the human spirit refusing to be crushed by the weight of oppression. South
Africa stood up to dismantle apartheid on its own soil; we must now stand
firmly with the children of Gaza, ensuring that their voices—and their
kites—are never permanently silenced.


*– Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the South Africa-based Media
Review Network. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Visit: **www.mediareviewnet.com* <http://www.mediareviewnet.com/>
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial
position of The Palestine Chronicle.
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