Amid the deafening roar of warplanes and the relentless siege that has turned Gaza into a wasteland, children still look upward, not in fear, but in hope. With no schools, no playgrounds, and nowhere safe to run, they have found a fragile freedom in the sky. From the ruins, they launch kites made from scraps and sorrow, tracing arcs of resistance across a sky that cannot be occupied.

In Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood, 11-year-old Sami stands on a crumbling rooftop, stringing together bits of aid box cardboard and torn plastic to make a kite. “When it flies,” he says softly, “I forget the sound of the warplanes.” Around him, children laugh, not because the war is over, but because they’ve stolen a moment of peace from its jaws.

With more than 14,000 children killed or wounded since October 2023, and hundreds of thousands displaced, Gaza’s youth are growing up in a world without refuge. Schools lie in ruins, shelters overflow, and food is scarce. Yet from the wreckage, kites rise, stitched from flour sacks, bedsheets, and hope. Some are painted with olive trees, names of the dead, or drawings of lost homes. They are messages to the sky, declarations that life still pulses below.

Imad, once a carpenter, now makes kites for children. “They are not just toys,” he says. “They’re the children’s way of coping, of breathing, of saying: we are still here.”

In a place where even childhood has been bombed, the sky has become their last playground. And in the colours of those fragile kites, Gaza’s children remind the world that even under siege, dreams still dare to fly.