The sky fills with paper. Hot summer wind holds it purposefully, adorning itself with the crinkling tails of bright, shuddering comets that sway in place like anxious horses. The earth-bound tilt their heads to watch. Some wind string around plastic bobbins or let it out in measured lengths, brows drawn together in concentrated appraisal; others scramble to retrieve and relaunch. It is 2009, and there are 3,710 kites over Gaza. This is a new world record.

Six months have passed since the kids who set this record survived their first war. Many of them have lost loved ones and virtually all of them share nightmares: airstrikes, chemical burns, doors kicked in. A Chinese kite-flying club will shatter their record in 2011, at which point those who have just lost homes will still be homeless. Israel will continue to restrict the entry of anything necessary to rebuild what it has ruined until the next war, in 2012, when the cycle of destruction and deprivation will begin anew. Still, Gaza’s children will regain their title only months after losing it, propelling some 12,350 kites into the air above Al-Waha beach. They will be praised for their resilience.

None of the kite fliers has ever tried to be resilient. That’s not really how resilience works. They like winning, and they like the beach, and they like activities that slow, however briefly, the desperate beating of small hearts that bolt like hunted animals at the sound of a popping balloon. We like resilience because it eases us into the hot bath of complicity, gives us permission to forget that every living human being is more or less equally fragile. We look at pictures of soaring kites and imagine that joy is the mortar that binds mankind across chasms of culture and experience. This feels better than considering the cruelty of manufacturing endurance. We do not recognize that a picture of three thousand soaring kites is also an x-ray of six thousand blackened lungs, all of which look like ours would look if we lived in a bell jar of vaporized buildings. We don’t see a cluster of cells in the chest of a green-eyed, gap-toothed seven-year-old that can only be treated on the other side of a border. In our peripheral vision, a boy who deserves a future will be resilient as hell until a soldier refuses to stamp a piece of paper.

The sky fills with paper. Obscured by a soot-black billow of smoke, airborne filing cabinets spray yellowing, typewritten records to the edge of the explosion’s radius. Someone’s dissertation, freshly bound, collides midair with a metal shelving bracket and cleaves into two ragged halves. When the ash begins to settle, eighty years of research have been atomized, but the chaos has spared a devastatingly clever doodle of an unpopular chemistry professor as an irritable toad. The drawing floats lazily to earth on a singed leaf of A4.

It is 2024, and each of Gaza’s twelve universities has been destroyed or badly damaged. The number of schools, municipal archives, and public libraries that remain intact shrinks every day. Online, Westerners see photographs of collapsed bookshelves, covered in gypsum, and kids pulling workbooks from the wreckage of their classrooms. The carnage moves them. Gaza has become a graveyard for books, where before it was merely a graveyard for people. We mourn over the shimmering casket of scholarship, weeping for the loss of knowledge as we haven’t for the people who produced it.

An Israeli soldier posts a picture to social media that shows him kneeling in the library of Gaza’s Islamic University, flipping nonchalantly through a book he has taken from the stacks. Behind him, flames eat through a row of tightly packed bookshelves. A Roman in Carthage, gloating.

The sky fills with paper. In dreams it falls like a flock of birds shot simultaneously, a shower of small corpses spinning to earth. In real life, clouds spill from the bellies of airplanes and drift like glitter in a snow globe, serene to the point of obscenity. The leaflets tell people to leave a place where they might be killed to go to a different place where they might be killed, to save themselves and their children by finding a way to be nowhere at all. The army believes that this is very noble. It is 2025, or 2023, or 2009, or 2014, and the army is applauding itself for preventing civilian casualties.

Once it has clapped loudly enough to alert the American media, the army drops other leaflets. Some of them taunt Gazans with verses from the holy Qur’an about God’s punishment of wrongdoers. Others arrive right before Ramadan to remind starving people to “feed the needy and speak kindly.” These are among several varieties of leaflets the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) chooses to sign with a star of David reading “The Righteous Conquest,” which in this instance even supplies a glib, sneering slogan: “Opening New Horizons for Gaza’s People.” Still others blackmail Gazans for intelligence. “You’ve been exposed,” they read. “Call the number below to save yourself.” They include rows and rows of photographs, names, and ID numbers, threatening individual Gazans with the revelation of sensitive information––criminal records, homosexuality, extramarital affairs––if they do not aid and abet their own extermination. Some of the accused aren’t old enough to read.

Of course, there are those who turn on each other. This is, as Israel knows, what people tend to do when they’re trapped. A global military superpower once more puffs its chest in pride: with a few thousand sheets of paper, it has enticed a handful of starving, traumatized civilians to fight amongst themselves. Most, however, don’t take the bait. Some use phones charged with hand cranks and car batteries to upload videos of themselves pointedly burning the leaflets, feeding them into the small cooking fires that have replaced their demolished or powerless stoves.

Defiant as it is, this act also speaks to the scarcity of fuel and kindling in an enclave choking on the black smoke of burning plastic. The siege has rarified paper before, placing books, stationery, and sanitary supplies on its ever-changing list of banned commodities, but it has never been in higher demand than it is this spring. Crowding into Gaza’s remaining buildings, people use it to mitigate the damage of repeated bombings, papering over blown-out windows and holes in the walls to protect themselves against the elements. They build makeshift shelters and Ramadan lanterns out of cardboard and stalk dwindling markets for exorbitantly priced toilet rolls that were scarce even before Israel stopped the slow crawl of aid trucks into the territory.

Menstrual products have disappeared altogether. A mere sixty kilometers from one of the world’s largest tampon manufacturers, a teenager manages her period with scraps cut from her family’s tent, rinsed hastily in contaminated water and dried in the sun. Bleeding into improvised pads, she shares bathrooms with unimaginable numbers of people––as of March 2024, there were 850 people to a toilet in Rafah, 3,600 to a single shower. Before, she thought cholera was just something people died of in the historical fiction novels her American cousins sent her. She also thought that polio was a pony sport, and that the plagues of the apocalypse were metaphorical.

I vomit quietly into a toilet at work. I have just spent two hours trying to dig up a video I swear I’ve seen in which a Palestinian woman talks about eating boiled cardboard to stave off starvation. I didn’t find it. I did find clips of glass-eyed people, translucent with hunger, gathering weeds to eat; of parents holding the shrouded bodies of children who starved to death; of boys packed in a writhing, desperate mass, stepping on each other’s backs and shoulders for a chance at getting a packet of flour. I read the account of a journalist who left Gaza only reluctantly, in fear of putting his family in danger, and found on his way out that, while his loved ones were struggling to eat once a day, the border crossing was littered with piles of discarded food. When the journalist reached Jordan, he peeled back the paper wrapping of a shawarma and cried in guilt and disbelief. His stomach could barely digest it.

My stomach is accustomed to abundance. It flips, now, beneath layers of soft, American fat, amidst organs that keep up the mysterious work of living without any particular strain. My body does not register the luxurious irony of rejecting food simply because it is furious and heartbroken over a prison full of starving people. I do not know how to stay upright in a world that sees hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths––medieval, deliberate, broadcast live––as an acceptable trade for an ethnostate. I wipe my mouth with a wad of toilet paper from a seemingly endless roll.

___________

NOTES

1. On July 30, 2009, Gazan children flew 3,710 kites in an initiative organized by UNRWA, setting a new world record. See “Most Kites Flown Simultaneously,” Guinness World Records 2011, American edition, ed. Craig Glenday (London: Guinness World Records, 2010), 104.

2. Here I am referring to “Operation Cast Lead,” as it was officially titled by the Israeli military, which the IOF carried out in Gaza between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009. According to Israeli human-rights organization B’tselem, this operation cost 1,387 Palestinian lives and 13 Israeli ones (including four Israeli soldiers killed by friendly fire). A March 2009 UNITAR/UNOSAT assessment reported 2,651 buildings destroyed or badly damaged by this campaign, noting that this number was likely an underestimate due to the difficulty of damage identification within densely populated urban areas (UNITAR/UNOSAT, “Satellite-Based Gaza Strip Damage Assessment Overview,” March 3, 2009). Israel’s breach of humanitarian norms during this period included the illegal use of white phosphorus, extensively documented by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based NGO that documents human-rights abuses worldwide (see Human Rights Watch, “Rain of Fire: Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” March 25, 2009).

3. Israel’s blockade of Gaza by land, air, and sea included specific prohibitions of vital construction materials, including iron bars, gravel, and concrete, when it began in 2007. Restrictions on other civilian goods were eased, though not eliminated, in June 2010, but the ban on construction materials continued officially until June 2011, when the IOF announced its decision to allow UNRWA to import necessary materials for the construction of schools. These materials were not actually admitted into the territory until November 15, 2011. Subsequent shipments received only sporadic approval until the eight-day “Operation Pillar of Defense” campaign in November 2012, when the ban was effectively reenacted. See “UN welcomes Israel’s decision to approve construction projects in Gaza,” UN News, June 22, 2011; “Israel Allows a Rare Shipment Of Construction Materials to Gaza,” New York Times, November 17, 2011, A11).

4. On April 16, 2011, the Kite Association of Weifang Binhai Economic-Technological Development Area sponsored a kite-flying event in Weifang City, Shandong Province, China, in which a record-breaking 10,465 kites were flown simultaneously. Per NBC News (“China Sets Record for Flying Most Kites,” July 2, 2011), Guinness announced the new record on June 30, 2011. On July 28, 2011, Gazans reclaimed the record at another UNRWA-sponsored event; according to the Guinness World Records website, they remain the record-holders at the time of writing. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-kites-flown-simultaneously

5. According to a UN press release published in April 2024, “Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza, was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.” The same document notes that “at least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education.” The team of 27 experts consulted in the document include Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Alexandra Xanthaki, Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. See “UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza,” April 18, 2024. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza

6. On May 23, 2024, Israeli soldier Tair Glisko posted a photo to Instagram of a soldier flipping through a book in a burning library. It is unclear whether Glisko himself appears in the photo. Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi posted a screenshot of the Instagram post to X, describing it as having been taken in the library of Al-Aqsa University. The image went viral and almost all subsequent reporting repeated Tirawi’s description. Snopes fact-checking confirmed the authenticity of the image, but located the incident in the Central Library of Gaza’s Islamic University (IUG). Visual comparisons between images of IUG’s library and the stacks shown in the photograph confirm this claim. It is unclear whether Al-Aqsa University shares this library, which is centrally located in IUG’s campus. According to IUG’s social media accounts, 240,000 books and 16,000 graduate theses and dissertations were destroyed in Israeli attacks between October 2023 and November 2024.

7. Other documented uses of The Righteous Conquest (“الفتح الصادق”) include leaflets dropped on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in January 2024. These flyers warned Palestinians that Hamas was putting their lives at risk by basing its military activities in hospitals (a claim that, while made frequently by the IOF, has yet to be proven). Gazan journalist Ahmed el-Madhoun posted an image of such a leaflet to X on January 18, 2024, noting “Tanks are close to us at Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Yunis....The scenario of besieging Al-Shifa Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip may be repeated!” Three days later, on January 21, 2024, the IOF began a five-week siege of Nasser Hospital that deprived approximately 150 health care workers and 350 patients of food and medical supplies and destroyed hospital infrastructure.

8. See “Displaced Palestinians burn Israeli leaflets dropped in Rafah,” Middle East Eye, January 16, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkDQV0KfUv4

9. Israel has been regularly restricting the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza since the early 1990s. Since the blockade assumed its current form in 2007, journalists and humanitarian groups have documented a dizzying number of items that have been banned seemingly arbitrarily for periods that vary widely in length. Toilet paper, stationery supplies, A4 paper, and books have all gone back and forth between permissibility and prohibition since 2007, joining such illicit sundries as candles, crayons, washing machines, needles, bedding, light bulbs, chocolate, shoes, and thread. For more information on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza, see weekly Humanitarian Situation Updates (numbered 1–300 at time of writing) issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-300-gaza-strip

10. Reporting by The Guardian, NPR, Al Jazeera, and other major news outlets has brought attention to the depletion of menstrual care supplies in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. For detailed look at the issue, see “Silent Struggles: The Menstrual Hygiene Crisis in Gaza” (United Nations Fund for Population Activities, May 2025).

11. Albaad, one of the three largest manufacturers of wet wipes and feminine hygiene products in the world, was founded in the Massuot Yitzhak kibbutz in the Ashkelon district, where it is still headquartered today. Massuot Yitzhak is located sixty kilometers north of Rafah.

12. Statistics drawn from “Gaza’s Children Trapped in a Cycle of Suffering,” UNICEF News Note, March 16, 2024.

13. See “The Unbearable Pain of Leaving Gaza” by Abubaker Abed (Drop Site News, May 12, 2025). Abed reports seeing discarded food at the Karm Abu Salem crossing.

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