Israel threatens assassinations over kites found to be harmless

Israel's prime minister and its defence minister threatened on Sunday to step up assassinations in the Gaza Strip and to move residents out of any area that kites, balloons or drones are launched from. The threat was a response to a small number of kites that have drifted across the perimeter in recent days.

Defence Minister Israel Katz instructed the military to act immediately and forcefully against any launch, and set out a scale on which the objects are interchangeable: "A balloon is like a kite, and a kite is like a drone, whether it carries explosives or not." He said every launch would be treated as an act of war, and that the response could extend to people accused of organising the launches and to what the military describes as infrastructure connected to them. The army chief, Eyal Zamir, took part in the assessment at which the measures were set.

Four kites were recovered near the community of Nahal Oz, one on Friday and three on Saturday morning. The military said none of them carried suspicious material and that they posed no danger to the public. That finding is not contested by either side, because it came from the same army now being ordered to treat the objects as drones.

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said on Sunday that the objects behind the threats are toys that children fly in the displacement camps, on what is left of the Strip's territory, with Israeli forces holding around 70 percent of it. "These threats, based on fabricated pretexts, are an attempt to justify the continuation of aggression," he said. He called on the US administration, on the mediators and guarantors of the ceasefire and on the Board of Peace to press Israel to stop.

A member of the movement's political bureau, Bassem Naim, said Israel had given it three days to bring the kite-flying to an end and had threatened a wider air campaign if it did not.

The policy has already been applied before it was announced. Israel attributed strikes it carried out in central Gaza on Sunday, in which two Palestinians were killed, to launches of kites, balloons and drones from the Strip.

What makes the announcement consequential is not the kites but the rule it sets out. Evacuating the area a kite came from does not require identifying who flew it; it requires only a direction. Most families in the Strip are living in tents on ground they have already been moved to more than once, and a rule keyed to the point of origin of a paper toy puts the threat of another move on whoever happens to be underneath it.