It has been less than two months since my niece Juri – a bright, giggling six-year-old – was killed inGaza. We buried her while her sister recovered from her injuries and her father tried to walk again on shattered legs. Just a week ago, I was struck by another unbearable loss. My 16-year-old nephew Ali was killed: a drone-fired rocket tore through him and six members of our extended family while they were sitting outside the last house we had left – the only one that hadn’t yet been reduced to dust.
Ali was split in two. That’s not a metaphor: it’s literally what the rocket did to his body. A child trying to escape the stifling heat inside a home without electricity, without water, without safety. A child whose only crime was sitting on a plastic chair in a corridor with his uncles – men in their 60s – trying to breathe, trying to live, trying to find a sliver of comfort in a place where even comfort has become a threat.
Why were they killed? They were not fighters. They had no weapons. They were not hiding. They were not “human shields”. They were not even moving. Just sitting quietly, maybe sipping tea, maybe just sweating and waiting for the night breeze. And then – a drone. A rocket. A flash. A crater. A silence that never ends. There is no “mistake” here. No misfire. The drone did not guess. It hovered. It watched. It picked its target. It aimed. And it hit. Directly.
And still there will be no headlines. No outrage, no press conferences, no candlelit vigils in western capitals, no hashtags, no questions asked. But I want to tell you something else. Even after all the horror inflicted on my family by Israel – the killings, the starvation, the loss – I said yes to an invitation to attend a peace conference in Paris. It was part of a series of gatherings leading up to a major summit that was meant to take place in New York, where President Emmanuel Macron had promised to push for the recognition of a Palestinian state.
Not long after the Paris meeting, the New York conference was quietly postponed. No explanation. No urgency. As if peace – like everything else in our lives – could be delayed indefinitely. Still, I went to Paris. I went even though I was warned there would be supporters of the Israeli governmentin the room.I didn’t flinch.I will go anywhere and speak to anyone if it means stopping the mass killing of my people.
I went not for revenge but for hope. I sat in a room with Israeli participants who said they wanted peace, just like I did. But something was off. While we all spoke of peace, only I seemed willing to speak of death. None of the Israelis I spoke to would acknowledge the genocide in Gaza. At best, a few admitted that Israel was committing war crimes – but not genocide. This, in spite of the overwhelming consensus amonginternational organisations,Israeli academicsandgenocide scholarsthat what is happening in Gaza amounts to a genocide.
A couple approached me quietly and, in whispers, confessed that, yes, what was happening was indeed a genocide. But they said it like a secret. A thing too dangerous to say aloud. As if the truth was a weapon that might ruin the prospect of peace.
We spoke of peace in abstract terms. Big, sweeping, beautiful ideas about coexistence and shared futures. But no one wanted to confront the blood-soaked ground beneath us. No one wanted to talk about starving children. Or the drone that tore through my nephew’s body. Or the silence that follows the screams. Even some fellow Palestinians – from other parts of Palestine – didn’t want to acknowledge the ongoing massacre in Gaza. I felt extremely alone. I felt like an obstacle. Like I was too raw, too inconvenient, too real. Everyone else was busy building bridges while I was still trying tokeep my family alive.
At one point, an Israeli woman asked me: “Wouldn’t it be better if Gazans left for a while, until Gaza is rebuilt?” She said it as if exile was neutral.As if 1948hadn’t happened. As if we hadn’t learned that when Palestinians leave, they’re not allowed to return. I told her: perhaps in theory, if people could leave temporarily and come back, then maybe. I even said: “Perhaps they could stay in the Negev desert [in southern Israel] and return when Gaza is rebuilt.” She stormed out. “You don’t want peace,” she told me.
But amid all of this, I also spoke with another Israeli woman – kind, thoughtful and honest – who told me that she had been directly impacted by the 7 October attack. She didn’t hide her pain. “We are the minority in Israel,” she said to me. “Most people are much more anti-Palestinian.” I believed her. And I appreciated her willingness to talk. But even she – someone who truly seemed to want peace – couldn’t bring herself to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide.
And that left me wondering: if this is the small minority of Israelis who believe in coexistence, and even they cannot confront what is happening in Gaza, what hope do we really have? If those who say they want peace cannot even recognise our suffering, what kind of peace are we talking about?
I don’t know whether that conference left me hopeless about peace or whether it taught me something essential: that peace between Palestinians and Israelis will require unimaginable courage. The kind that doesn’t flinch from reality or hide behind lofty words while people are being buried under concrete and fire.
Peace will require Palestinians to be willing to speak about their pain and still see the humanity of those who inflicted it. And it will require Israelis who are brave enough to confront what their government has done, and continues to do, in their name. There will be no real peace until both sides can stand face to face and say: “We were wrong. We were complicit. And we choose something better.”
Ali was killed after I returned from Paris, where I’d sat in the room and tried to build bridges. I’d told people about my niece Juri and begged them to see our pain – and now Ali too is gone. But something inside me has shifted. Not into rage but into resolve. Peace cannot be built on silence or denial. It cannot be built while Palestinians are treated as disposable. It begins with justice, truth and a political solution that guarantees the rights of Palestinians to live in freedom, in dignity and with self-determination. And at the very least, it must begin with the most basic right of all: the right to stay alive.
Ahmed Najar is a financial and political analyst as well as a playwright
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