The signal from the kites in Gaza

Over the weekend, the Israeli army spotted six kites in the skies above Nahal Oz and Kfar Aza, two of the kibbutzim overrun by Hamas during the pogrom on 7 October. The kites came from the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas began launching them in 2018, when it gave children incendiary kites with the aim of making them fall into the kibbutzim and set gardens or cultivated fields alight. From kites, the terrorists then moved on to helium-filled balloons and burning rags. Once launched into the air, the breeze would carry them to the other side of the fence. In the first half of 2018, the balloons and kites had burnt 610 hectares of agricultural land. The latest kites launched from the Gaza Strip towards the kibbutzim – which are slowly returning to life three years after the massacre – contained no explosives; they held nothing apparently dangerous apart from threatening messages in Arabic.

What aroused the most suspicion were not the phrases promising violence, but the length of the strings attached to the kites, which stretched as far as four kilometres – far too long for ordinary toys intended merely to carry threatening messages. The suspicion is that this was nothing more than a trial run to begin launching fibre-optic drones against the kibbutzim in southern Israel – the very same drones that Russia uses against Ukraine, which Moscow subsequently supplied to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which the Islamic Republic of Iran supplied to Hezbollah in Lebanon to strike the IDF, and which it would not be surprising if Hezbollah were to supply to Hamas. One cannot ask the Israeli army to withdraw from the Strip merely as a gesture to demonstrate that the plan for Gaza is moving forward; the disarmament of the terrorists is a serious matter because their intentions have not changed – the group will always seek to massacre Israelis. The cessation of all arms supplies must be carried out with care because, whilst Hamas acted alone on 7 October, it did so using tactics, ideas and weapons supplied by those who are now in a position to provide it with fibre-optic drones.