Now, hundreds of incendiary kites and explosive balloons have joined rockets, as well as tunnels transporting terrorists, on a list of fears for Naftalyahu and others in communities hugging the fence.

Warning of “swarming” attacks, Israeli forces have used live ammunition to stop Palestinian protesters from breaking out of Gaza en masse, injuring some 13,000. At least 142 demonstrators have also been killed, according to Gaza's health ministry. Israel's use of deadly force has provoked an international outcry.

Protesters in the desperately poor enclave say they are demonstrating against Israel’s crippling blockade and the U.S. decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, which undermines Palestinians’ own claim to the city as the capital of their future state. Senior international humanitarian officials warn that Gaza is on the verge of collapse.

Israeli officials say Gaza demonstrators have thrown rocks, "firebombs and explosive devices” toward the 40-mile fence. They also contend that Hamas, the Islamist group that has controlled Gaza since 2007 and that is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, is encouraging civilians to put themselves in harm’s way and has used them as cover to commit violence.

Powered by the wind from the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of flaming kites and explosive balloons have swept into Israel and started some 450 fires that have burned thousands of acres of farmland and nature reserves. Israel has responded with strikes on Gaza, which in turn has triggered a barrage of rockets.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump's special adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his adviser on Israel, Jason Greenblatt, traveled to the Middle East last week to try to develop an international aid package for Gaza. The agreement is widely thought to be a precursor to the president’s “deal of the century” aimed at a long-term resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though there have been few indications that the Palestinian leadership will accept it.

So while moving to a kibbutz — a traditional collective community — is the culmination of a lifelong ambition for many Israelis, the neighborhood's tensions and fears can make it a trial.

“I've always said, living here is 95 percent heaven and 5 percent hell,” said Adele Raemer, Naftalyahu’s mother.

Raemer, a Bronx native who settled in Israel four decades ago, described a more peaceful time in Nirim. It was before Israel withdrew Jewish settlements from Gaza, which it had occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. A Gazan built her ranch-style home, Raemer said, and she and a fellow teacher from the Strip once tried to collaborate across cultures.

Raemer, who runs a Facebook page about life on the border, believes Israelis and Palestinians can and should live in peace.

Smoke from burning fields hung in the warm air as Raemer pointed to where a mortar killed two Nirim residents in the last hours of the 2014 war with Gaza. Nearby sits a heavily fortified kindergarten building that does not have windows facing the direction of the Strip.

She said that in spite of criticism for using deadly force against protesters, the military’s response to the demonstrations had been proportionate.

“The force used by the IDF here on the border prevented thousands of Gazans from walking into Israel,” Raemer said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “Had that have happened, there would have been no choice but to kill many, many Gazans infiltrating, preventing them from entering Israeli communities like my own.”

Conscription is near universal in Israel, and faith in the military is pervasive.

“The IDF are my son, my son-in-law, my husband and me. It’s us. I know these people and I trust them,” Raemer said.

Daniel Rahamim, an Israeli irrigation specialist in Nahal Oz, another kibbutz near the Gaza Strip that that has been hard hit by fires set by incendiary kites, acknowledged that there may be a very few soldiers “who are just out to kill Palestinians.” Like Raemer, though, he also trusts that the military is overall doing the right thing in trying to control the protests in Gaza.

“I can tell you for sure — our army is a moral army. If there are bad soldiers, there are few,” he said. Aside from having a vested interest in keeping the kites away from the kibbutz’s fields, Rahamim, 64, is a longtime advocate of a two-state solution and reconciliation.

“When I was young, I met lots of Palestinians,” he said.

Daniel Rahamim stands in Nahal Oz kibbutz. Dusan Vranic / for NBC News

For now, though, Nahal Oz is trying to cope with the fiery kites and exploding balloons — and these just keep coming, burning some 20 percent of its 1,240 acres. A layer of sooty black blankets patches of the kibbutz’s fields, which are also ringed with razor-wire fence.

“It is so frustrating because we really work hard to grow a field with wheat,” Rahamim said. “The government isn't taking the fires seriously.”

It isn’t just that — there’s the danger of simply being so close to Gaza, which can be clearly seen from the fields.

“Snipers from the other side who can shoot you,” he said. “I have binoculars, I can see Hamas.”

Sitting on his front porch on Nahal Oz, he points toward the house where the 4-and-a-half-year-old son of neighbors was killed during the 2014 war with Gaza.

Rahamim admits he’s an optimist on the subject of reconciliation, but peace talks between Israel and Palestinian leaders in the West Bank have ground to a halt. Israel and Hamas have fought three conflicts in the last 12 years, and there is a growing sense that another war is inevitable.

Not everybody near the fence feels that talks and deals are the way to make the kites, balloons and rockets stop. Some believe the time for talks is over, if it ever existed.

“Too late — you had your opportunity,” Rabbi David Fendel, founder of the Hesder Yeshiva in Sderot, a town northeast of Gaza, said of Palestinian leadership.