1/15 You know you’re close to Israel’s fence with Gaza when you see plumes of smoke billowing from farmland. Something here doesn’t belong.
Patches of sunflowers and hay bales alternate with vast stretches of scorched earth.
3/15: The kites seem like child’s play: On the Gaza aside, boys and teenagers put them together. (Photo: @abuheweila) 
4/15: But flaming tails turn them into weapons, one that Israel has struggled to defend against. (Photo: @abuheweila)
5/15: In parched farmland, even a charcoal brick can set a powerful blaze in a short time. Hundreds of acres have been torched.
6/15: This one landed in the dirt near us.
7/15: Israel has responded with tech. Working from the back of an army pick up, a few pudgy men with beards and virtual reality glasses looked like they were playing a video game. But they were piloting drones.
8/15: It’s a simple task: Chase the kite, get the drone tangled in the string, and let the drone’s weight bring the whole thing down to earth. They say they have brought down 500 kites so far.
9/15: The drones don’t stop all the kites, though. Israeli tractors move as fast as they can to smother fires before they spread.
10/15: The Israeli army gave journalists a look at their side of the fence Friday. Behind staggered berms and sniper platforms, soldiers on dirt bikes, quads and in jeeps raced left and right as Palestinians tried to outflank them and seek an opportunity to cut through the fence.
11/15: Besides the snipers, Israel has observers watching, filming and videotaping the protests through scopes, long lenses, and cameras mounted on vehicles, drones and hovering overhead on tethered balloons.
12/15: Israeli jeeps keep arriving at and departing from the fence, presumably to reload with tear-gas grenades.
13/15: Commanders acknowledge they are using a lot of gas — they insist they do all they can to avoid live fire. The wind was blowing our way, however, and it only took a few seconds before we and the soldiers were all suffering from its effects.
14/15: We heard live fire several times. He also heard the loud explosion of what officers said was one of four improvised grenades or bombs thrown at Israeli troops today. Just across the fence from us, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniya paid a visit. (Photo: @abuheweila)
15/15: The losses to Israeli agriculture from flaming kites have been immense, though farmers raced to harvest early. But young people from nearby keep coming to look. On both sides, the protests, no matter how deadly, amount to an only-in-the-Middle-East reality show.
16/15 (Really, that's it now): For Israel's firefighters, it's a strange, haunting, and seemingly endless new challenge.
