Today is the one-year anniversary of the first day of the Gaza siege. Many of us can clearly remember the horror: the first bits of news trickled in and protests exploded around the world out of solidarity and, possibly, guilt for not having acted sooner. Day by day, the death toll rose; I myself can remember climbing out of bed in the morning in fear of the new numbers I would read.
We were uninvited spectators; that I knew. We had forgotten about our suffering Palestinian brothers until the very moment they needed us the most, and even then our passion [...]

When Palestinian children make the news, it’s often–let’s face it–because they’ve died. A combination of “no news is good news” reporting and the simple sadness of everyday life in Israel and Palestine create a bleak portrait for those of us trying to follow the everyday lives of relatives, friends, or even strangers. So what are children from Gaza doing on the news, if they’ve escaped unharmed?
They’ve broken a world record–the most kites flown in the air simultaneously in the same location, to be exact. Thousands of children from the Gaza strip gathered along a beach in the north of the [...]