Community Kite Project for Gaza Comes to Santa Fe

For the last year, the Community Kite Project for Gaza has folded kites representing each child killed in Israel’s genocide, and raising money for Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip. 505OMATIC spoke with Sarah Ruth, the Albuquerque artist behind the project, and Antoinette Noor Khader, a Palestinian-American poet, singer and founder of the Among the Rubble Collective.

Originally on display at the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, the project officially moves to El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe this Saturday with a family-friendly kite-folding event including music, poetry, and homemade Palestinian baklava and hummus. Presented in partnership with the Southwest Coalition for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Santa Fe and Santa Feans for Justice in Palestine, the exhibition continues at El Museo for the next couple of weeks.

Among the Rubble Collective runs an ongoing mutual aid project providing water, hot food, blankets, and shoes to Palestinians in Gaza. In fall 2025, as Israel forcibly displaced Palestinians from the northern part of the Gaza Strip, ARC partnered with author Sim Kern to help more than 30 families move out of Gaza City.

Now, the Community Kite Project for Gaza is trying to raise money to evacuate a Palestinian family out of Gaza through neighboring Egypt. When the border is open, it can cost $5,000 in cash to evacuate just one person, and brokers take up to a 40% cut when withdrawing cash from bank funds, Khader said. Organizers have already raised about $15,000 toward the effort but the family has ongoing living expenses like baby formula, school tuition, tent repairs, and electricity.

The poem If I Must Die, by the late Palestinian scholar and poet Refaat Alareer, inspired the project. At their previous event, they played a recording of Oyoun, one of Alareer’s students and a cancer patient who has gone through two pregnancies, reading the poem; we have reproduced parts of that recording in our video with permission.

You can donate directly to the evacuation fund here.

You can also donate directly to Oyoun here.