Kibbutz Sa’ad. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A kibbutz in southern Israel found a positive way to respond to the destruction of one of its fields by a “kite bomb” flown across the border from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip earlier this week, the Hebrew news site Mako reported.

On Thursday evening, the children of Kibbutz Sa’ad flew 250 kites carrying messages of “peace and love” in a wheat field next to one that was burned.

“Every year at Shavuot, we hold a ceremony, after which our harvesters go out and reap the wheat,” kibbutz official Efrat Shlomi told Mako. “When we were preparing for the ceremony, we were hearing all the time about burning kites, and then this week one came to us, burning a 50-dunam wheat field that was ready for harvest.”

“We wanted to bring something good and light to a period of stress and worry, so we added kites to the ceremony,” she added. “But instead of kites of hate, these are kites of peace and love.”

Word of the kibbutz’s plan got out and went viral, and a donor from northern Israel provided the kites.

“There was a lot of buzz, this apparently struck people somewhere deep,” Shlomi said. “There is a feeling that we as simple citizens can do something to change the situation, the atmosphere, the conversation.”