OPINION
The jungle advances. But we can stop it with our own eyes.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas broke into Israeli homes. It killed 1,218 people. The youngest of the girls and boys killed that day was nine months old. 252 people were dragged into the tunnels of Gaza. Some were raped. Others would die of starvation in captivity, while Hezbollah launched thousands of rockets at Israeli towns, and a rocket — attributed by Western and Israeli intelligence to Hezbollah, which denies it and says it was an errant Israeli Iron Dome interceptor — hit a football pitch in Majdal Shams, killing twelve Druze teenagers from the occupied Golan while they played: most of them had refused Israeli citizenship.
The international response? Verbal condemnations, then silence. And while the bodies of Israeli hostages rot in the tunnels, the war machine shifts to Gaza. The June 2026 report of the UN Commission of Inquiry certifies that, in the first two years of the war, 20,179 Palestinian children were killed. The Commission speaks of a strategy to destroy 'the biological continuity and future existence' of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The Israeli government calls the report 'defamatory' and a 'libellous sham,' accusing the Commission of ignoring Hamas's systematic use of human shields. But a Palestinian child under the rubble of Rafah and a Druze child killed by a rocket in Majdal Shams weigh the same: neither is propaganda. They are flesh, bone, and a cancelled future.
The fury does not stop at people. It falls on sacred places and on memory. In Lebanon, Israeli strikes repeatedly hit the Baalbek area, a UNESCO World Heritage site: the raids have not so far directly damaged the Roman temples, but they have levelled historic buildings a few hundred metres away, while according to a Washington Post satellite analysis nearly 6,000 buildings in southern Lebanon have been damaged or destroyed. On the other side, Hezbollah's rockets make no distinction between a kibbutz and an archaeological site: they sow terror among Israeli civilians, forcing entire communities to flee.
International law is the real corpse in this room. The Hague court orders Israel to halt the Rafah offensive. Guterres calls the order binding. Netanyahu rejects it as unacceptable, and the raids continue. Hamas ignores the demands to release the hostages. The international community shrugs. The 1954 Hague Convention, which protects cultural property, is invoked more and more often and respected less and less. Geneva's rules are cited by both sides as an accusation against the other, rarely as a constraint on themselves.
And then there are the jailers and the jailed, who mirror each other in the abyss. Palestinian paediatrician Hussam Abu Safiya, former director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, has been detained by Israel since December 2024, in isolation, with reports of beatings and torture relayed by UN experts and his lawyer. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has declared his detention 'arbitrary' and called for his immediate release; Israel's Supreme Court, instead, rejected the appeal based on confidential materials. The Israeli military accuses him of being a senior officer in Hamas's military medical service — a charge Hamas and Gaza's health ministry deny, and which has not so far been backed by public evidence. At the same time, Israeli hostages in Hamas's tunnels are being starved and denied medical care. Their families wait for a body or a survivor, while international mediators fail. An accused doctor and a starving hostage: two faces of the same uncertainty, and of the inhumanity that surrounds it.
The last truth: we are the governments
For a long time we believed international law would save us. We waited for the Hague court to speak, for the UN to act, for governments to stop. But the Court has been challenged rather than enforced, the monuments remain under threat, the rules are invoked more often than they are honoured.
And then we understood: governments are not abstract entities. They are made of people. People who, like us, have eyes to see and ears to listen. People who, like us, choose every day which way to look.
If the war machine keeps grinding down lives, it is not only because governments choose to. It is also because we — citizens, voters, human beings — allow it to happen without real consequences. It is because we have grown used to seeing the other's pain as 'their problem.' It is because the media, too often, has taught us to count the dead in two separate columns: those who count more, and those who count less.
But what if one day — all together — we lifted the blindfolds from our eyes?
What if one day a Palestinian looked at the face of a grieving Israeli mother and saw his own mother? What if an Israeli heard the cry of a Palestinian child under the rubble and heard his own son? What if a Lebanese person saw an Israeli soldier moved before a threatened temple and recognised his own grief for Baalbek?
On that day, governments would change. Because governments are made of people who look in the same direction we do. If that direction becomes shared humanity, politics follows. There is no need to wait for leaders to talk to each other: it is enough for the right people on both sides to begin recognising one another.
It will not be a quick process. Prejudices are walls built over generations. But they fall in an instant: when one eye meets another eye and sees a human being.
The jungle advances. But the jungle is made of blind gazes. We can choose to see.
Today I reach out my hand. I am not waiting for governments to sign peace: I am waiting for people — Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, from all over the world — to decide that a neighbour's pain weighs as much as their own.
Because future generations will not ask us who won. They will ask: 'You, who had the power to look, why did you choose to turn away?'