On November 7, 2023, children stood before cameras at al-Shifa Hospital and spoke in English, not their mother tongue, but in the language of those they thought might save them. “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children,” one boy said. “We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as other children live.” Even then, barely a month into the genocide, they had no clean drinking water, no food and no medicine. They begged in the colonisers’ language because they thought it might make their humanity legible.
I wonder how many of those children are dead now, how many never made it to this moment of “peace”, and whether they died still believing the world might answer their call.
Now, almost two years later, US President Donald Trump posts that he is “very proud” of the signing of the first phase of his “peace plan”. French President Emmanuel Macron praises and commends Trump’s initiative, while Israeli leader Yair Lapid calls on the Nobel Committee to award Trump a peace prize. Leaders have lined up to claim credit for ending a genocide they spent two years, and the previous 77, funding, arming and enabling.
But Gaza never needed saving. Gaza needed the world to stop killing it. Gaza needed the world to simply let its people live on their land, free of occupation, apartheid and genocide. Gaza’s people merely needed the objective, legal and moral standard generously afforded to those who murdered them. Gaza’s genocide exposed a world that preaches justice yet funds oppression, and a people who turned survival itself into defiance.
All that to say, glory to the Palestinian people, to their steadfastness and to their collective power. Palestinians refused to submit to a narrative imposed upon them, that they were beggars seeking aid, “terrorists” who needed to pay, or anything less than a people whose dignity deserved to be upheld without reservation or degradation.
Gaza did not fail. We did. Gaza resisted when the world expected it to break. Gaza stood alone when it should never have had to stand alone. Gaza endured despite international abandonment, despite governments that funded its destruction and now celebrate themselves as peacemakers.
As a man of faith, I am reminded of this:
“When they are told, ‘Do not spread corruption in the land,’ they reply, ‘We are only peacemakers!’” (Quran 2:11)
Nothing says peace like two years of starvation, bombardment and mass graves, when, instead of delivering food, they delivered shrouds.
And while Gaza bled, the powerful perfected the art of denial. And when I see the people of Gaza celebrating in the streets, I know that this celebration belongs to them alone, not to Donald Trump, who has announced he will visit the region to take credit for what he calls a “historic occasion”, and not to Western leaders who profited from Gaza’s devastation while pretending neutrality. The people rushing to cameras to claim credit are the same ones who made the genocide possible, who funded it with billions in military aid, armed it with precision-guided missiles and provided diplomatic cover at the United Nations while repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions. The United States approved an additional $14.3bn in military aid during the genocide, bypassing congressional oversight multiple times to rush Apache helicopter missiles, 155mm artillery shells, night-vision equipment and bunker-busting bombs that landed on the heads of families as they slept.
Those of us sitting in the comfort of the West should feel shame. Americans like to imagine themselves on the right side of history. We tell ourselves that had we lived during Jim Crow or the Holocaust, we would have done anything to stop it. But we have 340 million people in America, and we could not stop our tax dollars from funding extermination. We could not even deliver baby formula, as we watched babies’ bodies waste away. Many sat in complicity, made excuses for the inexcusable, blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, and turned away from the horror because acknowledging it would have meant confronting our own government’s role in funding it. Our failure did not eclipse Palestinian agency; it made it more visible.
The only pressure that mattered came from the people Israel could not silence, Palestinians who livestreamed their own deaths so the world could not claim ignorance or accept Israel’s falsehoods as truth. Gaza survived because of its own resistance, a resistance to which its people are entitled. The ceasefire came because Palestinian steadfastness broke something the bombs could not touch, because the facade of Israeli victimhood crumbled under the weight of livestreamed atrocity, and because global public opinion turned against Israel despite every effort to manufacture consent for genocide. What it accomplished is written in civilian death rolls, not in security. That is what forced this ceasefire.
Palestine’s most celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwish, knew how this would go: “The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.” Now they broker peace between the killer and the killed, the butcher and the slain, and call it progress. The price was paid in Palestinian blood. And somewhere, an old woman, a new bride or an orphaned daughter is still waiting for their loved ones to come home.
There must be full accountability, not just for Israel but for every government and corporation that made this genocide possible. There must be a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel immediately, economic sanctions until there is complete withdrawal from occupied territory, freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian hostages, and reparations for reconstruction determined and distributed by Palestinians themselves. War criminals must be prosecuted at The Hague, regardless of which nation objects. This is just the start. Justice is not a diplomatic option; it is the minimum measure of our shared humanity.
The “peace” Trump’s plan promises died with every child in Gaza, every displaced family, and every day the world called genocide “self-defence”, ignoring the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling that an occupier cannot claim self-defence against the occupied.
The only just future is complete liberation — one democratic state with equal rights for all, beginning with Gaza’s right to determine its own fate without siege, without occupation and without foreign control disguised as peacekeeping. But first, the people of Gaza have earned the right to mourn, to count their dead and bury them properly, and above all, to feel this small moment of joy. Palestinians have earned, through unimaginable suffering, the right to define what freedom looks like. The rest of the world has no standing to tell them otherwise.
For those of us in the West, we must make sure that the world does not return to normal. We cannot be lulled back to sleep by the temporary cessation of air strikes while the occupation continues. Israel cannot continue as if it did not commit the gravest crime of our generation. The hundreds of thousands of martyred and maimed Palestinians demand justice that cannot be denied.
We cannot rest until the entire system of occupation and apartheid is dismantled and replaced with liberation. This is only the beginning. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
