Over the past week, the United States and Israel have escalated their conflict with Iran into open war. The death toll has already surpassed 1,200, and tensions across the region continue to intensify. The justification, as always, rests on the language of preemption: the claim that Iran must be struck now to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

We are told the threat was too close, too dangerous, too imminent to wait.

History, however, has shown how often such claims are invoked — and how often they collapse only after the damage has already been done.

One of the clearest examples came in 1998, when the Clinton administration bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. The strike was carried out after American officials claimed the facility was not truly a pharmaceutical plant but rather a “biological weapons facility.”

The evidence? It never materialized.

Executed on the direct order of President Bill Clinton, U.S. forces fired fourteen cruise missiles that leveled the factory, reducing it to nothing more than “broken concrete and iron bars,” with “thousands of brown bottles of veterinary and other medicines” scattered across the sand.

The factory produced roughly 90 percent of Sudan’s pharmaceuticals. When it was destroyed, access to basic medicines collapsed. In the months that followed, thousands — many of them children — are believed to have died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that were otherwise entirely treatable.

Actions like these are almost always justified through the framing of a perceived threat — or, as we hear so often today, something described as “imminent”. The pattern is familiar: a danger is said to be approaching, and with it the justification for a strike meant to prevent something far more destructive.

But the consequences are rarely abstract. They unfold in hospitals left without medicine, in families burying children, in societies forced to absorb the cost of decisions made by distant powers, and in the anger that such destruction leaves behind.

Today, we are hearing the same language again.

For more than three decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Iran was on the “verge” of obtaining a nuclear weapon. The timeline has shifted over the years — sometimes a few years away, sometimes months, sometimes only weeks — but the message has remained unchanged.

On Monday, he offered the latest version of that warning, saying Israel and the United States struck Iran because Tehran’s atomic-bomb and ballistic-missile programs were about to become “immune within months.” If action was not taken now, he argued, then “no action could be taken in the future.”

More than thirty years after those warnings first began, the argument remains exactly the same. Act now, or it will be too late.

Yet reality has often told a different story. As Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said in response to this week’s offensive:

“There is no evidence from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), from independent analysis of commercial satellite imagery, nor any evidence presented to Congress from the U.S. intelligence community that Iran was rebuilding the damaged nuclear facilities and preparing to restart enrichment operations.”

Even so, the language of urgency persists. There always seems to be a narrowing window, a looming catastrophe, and a strike that must happen now.

And so the strikes began.

In just five days of bombardment, more than 1,200 people are reported to have been killed. Even on the first day of the strikes, the scenes were already devastating. In Minab, in southern Iran, more than 170 students were reportedly killed, including at least 108 schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve when a strike hit their school.

But the victims were not only children in classrooms. That same day, further west in Lamerd, a missile struck a sports hall where teenage girls had gathered for athletic practice, killing at least 20 members of a local girls’ volleyball team.

Still, as families bury their children and the country gathers in mourning, the numbers continue to grow by the day. They always do. And the cost of these so-called preemptive strikes becomes harder and harder to ignore.

It is easy to speak about “preemption,” about strategic calculations and military necessity. But history has shown how easily those words can obscure the human reality that follows.

We have seen this logic before — long before the Al-Shifa bombing in Sudan. Again and again, we see the power that an assumption of threat has to move people, mobilize forces, and postpone the burden of proof until it is too late. And each time, the price is paid not by those who invoke the language of urgency, but by the civilians who must live and die beneath it.

This piece was also published by Common Dreams on Feb. 26, 2026.

I’ve grown accustomed to the violence in Palestine; to seeing my brothers and sisters stripped from their homes and taken away from life itself. That violence has always felt close. And yet, with Nasrallah Abu Siyam, it became unmistakable.

Not only was he my age, he was born just miles from my hometown. An American citizen. Living an ordinary life. Dreaming of ordinary things. And still, he was shot and killed by Israeli settlers, simply for helping guard his family’s livestock in the occupied West Bank.

In nearly every way, his life mirrored mine. The only difference was where he stood. And that difference, it seems, was enough.

What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades — one in which violence is routine, accountability is absent, and loss is absorbed without consequence.

That pattern is clearest in how these moments of violence unfold. In Mukhmas, the village where Nasrallah was killed, a resident described what happened plainly:

“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets.”

In other words, the presence of the occupying forces did not interrupt the violence; it emboldened it. This is a reality Palestinians have long understood — that the forces ostensibly tasked with “maintaining order” often function instead as a mechanism for enabling and inflicting violence.

Time and time again, Palestinians are left to bury the result.

The scale of that violence is not abstract, nor is it disputed.

Between October 2023 and October 2025 alone, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers — 229 of them children. That means more than one in five of those killed were children. In that same span of time, over 10,900 Palestinians were wounded and nearly 21,000 were detained.

And yet, none of this devastation takes place in a battlefield. There is no armed group to point to, no battle to cite. What remains is an occupied territory where civilian death, injury, and detention occur as a matter of policy and practice — not as rare or exceptional events.

By this point, it may sound like a broken record — not just from me, but from years of warnings repeating what the international community has recorded and then promptly ignored. But repetition becomes inevitable when impunity is preserved at every level.

Impunity — that, I must say — does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained through material support, political protection, and deliberate silence. All of which the United States is deeply embedded in: in the weapons supplied, in the cover extended, and in what goes unsaid. When Americans like Nasrallah Abu Siyam — at least six of them in the past two years — are killed under an occupation supported by U.S. authority, and little is said and less is done, that silence becomes a statement in itself.

Put simply, it is a statement of how Palestinian life — American or not — is weighed, and how little that weight has meant in the political world.

No power should have the authority to dictate which lives are expendable — and which are not. Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it. But again, that failure is not abstract. It has a name, a place, and a date.

Just a few days ago, Rotana al-Raqab returned to Gaza carrying not relief, but the weight of humiliation. Barred from her home for over 20 months, even then, as the city stretched before her and her family waited beneath her, she could not step down into the crowd without restraint.

Before greeting her family, before taking in the streets and buildings she had longed to see, she raised her voice in distress:

Her words, a cry of deprivation, spread across the Gaza Strip, defying the occupying power that has long denied Palestinians their right to return.

The depth of her suffering reached far beyond Gaza’s ever-shifting borders, her pain visible in every frame and her story emblematic of the reality Palestinians are forced to live with each day.

Humiliation at the border

At first, relief really did wash over Rotana and her mother as they entered the Gaza Strip. They were greeted warmly by the Palestinian Embassy, and the entry procedures moved forward quickly. After a long, exhausting day, it finally felt as though things were going smoothly — as if their homecoming was within reach.

They imagined stepping back into their home, reuniting with their family, and sharing the gifts they had brought from Egypt.

But that brief moment of relief was shattered when they were told Israeli forces would take control of the transfer.

“When the Israeli forces took us, they tied our hands together, blindfolded us, and took us to an integration point.”

In that instant, their fear and uncertainty became all too real.

Rotana, her mother, and a neighbor traveling with them were taken into custody and interrogated by the Israeli occupying forces.

“They started asking us questions about things we know nothing about, and have nothing to do with.”

Subjected to the interrogation Palestinians face routinely, Rotana and her family were bombarded with questions about why they left, why they were returning, and, beyond that, their connection to Hamas and October 7th — just about every topic the forces could throw at them.

Then came the threats from the forces, sharp and relentless:

“You will never again in your life enter Gaza. Gaza is ours.”

“Why don’t we go get your children and you can all leave Gaza? In this instance, we will give you your children and you can leave.”

“The peace plan you people are talking about does not exist. We are going to displace the people of Gaza and take over Gaza.”

Having left Gaza to help her mother undergo an urgent heart operation, upon her arrival, this was the harsh reality Rotana faced: the very soldiers who had menaced her were the gatekeepers to her children — her only path to them ran through their intimidation, harassment, and control.

“They put psychological pressure on us. They would grab us. They raised their weapons at us. They threatened to detain us, to keep us from seeing our children, and that we would never see Gaza again. They threatened us in every single way.”

And still, in the face of relentless threats and psychological pressure, Rotana remained focused on making it home, determined to endure whatever it took to be reunited with her family.

Part of that meant leaving behind nearly everything they had brought with them. “Everything was forbidden,” says Rotana. They weren’t even allowed to carry basic necessities.

“Food was forbidden. Water was forbidden. Perfume was forbidden. Anything entering Gaza is forbidden.”

Beyond these restrictions, Rotana and her mother weren’t even allowed to bring the essential medication she needed after her procedure, or the gifts they had hoped would bring joy to their children.

“They emptied everything from our stuff and promised us nothing in return. They only allowed us to pass with clothes — one bag per person, just one bag each.”

Yet, after three hours of grueling integration, Rotana and her mother finally returned to Gaza, reunited with their family and once again able to step foot on Palestinian soil.

“It was a terrible day for us, but all praise is due to Allah. He intervened by sending the United Nations, and they came and took us, bringing us to the area where the Nasser Hospital is located.”

That day of humiliation, that relentless stripping away of dignity, was not an isolated incident. For Rotana, it was a stark reminder of the inescapable reality of occupation — where even the smallest comforts are denied and basic human rights are withheld.

For Palestinians, the journey home is rarely one of long-awaited relief; instead, it becomes another step in a long line of indignities endured simply to live on their own land.

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“Where is the so-called ‘yellow line?’”

This is a question Palestinians have been trying to answer for months on end. One day the line is in place, the next it shifts, and the day after it appears to stand still — until it doesn’t.

Every morning, families wake up unsure whether the yellow boulders marking Israeli occupation will inch closer, swallowing more land, more homes, and more lives.

Never did Rotana and her mother imagine this measure of uncertainty would reach them upon their return to Gaza.

“When I left my family, they were at home. The house was within the yellow line, and they were at home. [But] I returned to find them in a tent. In a tent — they can no longer return home.”

The conditions, she says, were beyond description.

“I can’t even describe to you how bad the tent was.”

The yellow line had shifted, and with it, so did the very meaning of home. Today, a makeshift tent of canvas and poles replaces the walls that once sheltered her family.

Less a home than a daily battle for survival, the tent is overcrowded and exposed, sheltering multiple families without protection from the cold nights or the suffocating heat to come.

There is no privacy, no sanitation, no safety, and no sense of dignity for those displaced across the Gaza Strip.

Just as her experience of humiliation is not unique, neither are these conditions. Across the Gaza Strip, between 1.5 and 2 million Palestinians are now living in makeshift tents, displaced not only by bombardment, but by the shifting line that renders homes uninhabitable day after day.

The line moves, and people are expected to move with it, carrying nothing but what they can hold.

And so, for Palestinians, what remains is a landscape of tents pitched where homes once stood — a population rendered temporary on its own land, and a system that renders displacement an everyday, inescapable reality.

Even amid displacement and despair, her voice endures

Through all of the pain and suffering, we have seen the Palestinian people stand firm in their dignity, and firm in their faith.

Perhaps that is why hearing stories like Rotana’s is so devastating — to watch a woman, so human and so innocent, endure bombardment and brutality at the hands of occupying soldiers, simply for trying to return home.

And yet, like her brothers and sisters who endure the same daily humiliations, Rotana has found the courage to speak out, refusing to let fear or oppression silence her.

“I want to relay this message to you all:

You must return to Gaza. You must return. No matter if they continue to oppress us. No matter what they do. We need to come back. This is your homeland.”

In that tent, Rotana spoke not just to plead. She embodied resilience, bore witness to the steadfastness in faith of her people, and affirmed an unbreakable connection to home. Even further, her words carried a summons to recognize the humanity of the displaced, to honor the Palestinian cause, and to stand alongside them.

Her words serve as a reminder that the struggle for dignity, justice, and the rights of those living under Israeli occupation is not theirs alone; it is a responsibility that belongs to all of us.

Together, in the shadow of displacement, in the face of humiliation, and amid profound uncertainty, Rotana’s story endures, carrying a single, unyielding message: we cannot turn away. We must continue to stand together in bearing witness, in amplifying their voices, and in upholding justice wherever it is threatened, for as long as it is required.

“Our days before the war were beautiful, and we had so many dreams. But then the bombing happened, and I lost an eye and a leg, and was left unable to do anything,” says Farah Mahmoud al-Kahlut, just seventeen, from north of Gaza City.

In an instant, at home in Jabalia, Farah lost her parents, her leg, and her sight in both eyes, struck by an airstrike ordered from afar. Nearly a year and a half later, she waits for treatment delayed for months, in a city of displacement, destruction, and shattered lives, where movement is restricted and life itself has been uprooted.

Her story, just one of thousands, is marked by unimaginable loss — but above all, by the quiet determination to survive and to hold onto hope, even when it feels nearly impossible to do so.

Life under occupation

Farah grew up in Jabalia, one of Gaza’s oldest refugee camps, where life was crowded, uncertain, and fragile. Generations of families who had been uprooted in 1948 lived here, carving out homes, schools, and moments of joy in the shadow of displacement.

Living in this fragile environment, Farah’s community endured the first massacre in 1967 — nearly 20 years before the first major resistance movements against Israeli occupation — and bore the brunt of repeated waves of violence in the decades that followed.

Violence was a constant. Thousands of civilians were killed, the imposed blockade made survival a daily struggle, and reports of war crimes — and even crimes against humanity — committed by the occupying forces continued to emerge, most recently in 2022.

But life went on. Families adapted, children went to school, and young people married and started families.

Daily life unfolded in a neighborhood where more than 120,000 people were packed into just 1.4 square kilometers (barely over half a square mile), with electricity both restricted and unreliable, often-contaminated water, and few opportunities for work. Every day carried the constant shadow of sudden destruction, as if the sky could collapse at any moment.

Then came the latest onslaught, genocidal in nature and more devastating than anything the community had endured before. At the heart of it all, among countless other innocent lives, was Farah — a teenage girl with her whole life ahead of her.

Blind faith

Under siege, Farah and her family had nowhere to hide. During repeated strikes on her neighborhood, an airstrike completely obliterated the house where she and her family had taken shelter.

More than 25 people in and around the home were killed, including both of her parents. From the rubble and panic, Farah and her brother were pulled out with severe injuries. And in this new state of devastation and searing pain, she fell into a coma that lasted nearly a week.

Only after some time had passed did she realize she had lost her leg. Unable to feel her legs at the time, she didn’t even realize it. In that instant, with no sense of justice or recourse, everything was taken from her: her dreams, her aspirations, her desire to study, and even her ability to walk and see the world as she once did.

Farah’s experience reflects a shared reality for more than 170,000 Palestinians injured in Gaza today — all civilians, including tens of thousands of children whose lives are shattered before reaching adulthood.

She is one of thousands of children left without parents and permanently disabled by violence, her body and life marked by decades of occupation, repeated bombardment, and confinement to Gaza’s crowded refugee camps.

For children like Farah, the loss reaches beyond the scars etched on their bodies to the erasure of a future once imagined — an education cut short, ambitions deferred, and the ability to grow up and live even a semblance of a “normal” life stripped away.

In nearly every shot, she can be seen connecting her current state of trauma to her dream of returning to school, drawing, and studying with her friends as she once did. A future erased, yet painfully present in her mind, and still, the hope for that future refuses to fade.

But even as she dreams of going back to school, sitting among her classmates, and reclaiming the life she once imagined, she remains trapped amid the rubble of her destroyed home, waiting for the border to open and uncertain if she has any chance of saving one of her eyes.

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Trapped in displacement

Today, Farah is trapped — not only beneath the weight of her injuries, but within a Gaza where movement in and out has long been restricted. For her, the chance of saving one of her eyes depends not only on healing, but on whether a border will ever open.

“After they examined my eyes, they said one would need to be removed, and the other had a chance of surviving. I was supposed to have surgery six months later. Now it has been over a year, and it hasn’t happened,” she says, speaking from what remains of Jabalia.

Blessed to hold one of the few medical referrals for evacuation, Farah nonetheless remains trapped where the bombing claimed her family and destroyed her home. That home, once a place of “refuge,” now lies surrounded by ruins.

Just like Jabalia, Farah’s life has been turned upside down since the strike.

Her hopes and dreams have been taken from her, and meanwhile, she waits for treatment that could save one of her eyes and allow her to reclaim even a small part of her life.

Living in a tent beneath a damaged building, Farah has appealed to the international community, “I am asking anyone who can help with my referral or help me travel for treatment, so that hope can return to my eye. I want to be treated so that hope can return to my eyes.”

But that hope now rests on the scheduled opening of the border this week — a promise that has repeatedly fallen short. Since April 2024, only around 70 people have been able to cross through the Rafah border. Promises of passage have been delayed or denied, leaving Farah and countless others in limbo, waiting for treatment that could restore not just her sight, but a measure of life itself.

To much of the world, this was breaking news. But for Palestinians, it is neither new nor shocking; it is a systemic reality that repeats itself with devastating regularity. In these moments of renewed grief and loss, they are reminded of how briefly hope once felt on the first day of the ceasefire.

Day One: Saleh al-Jafarawi

Just a few months ago, the world watched as a so-called “ceasefire” was first announced. Celebrations erupted from the Levant to the United States, and one can only imagine the scale of emotion felt by Palestinians — whether in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank, or among those forced into exile over the years.

For many, the voice that led that surge of hope and unfiltered joy was Saleh al-Jafarawi, a twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian journalist, community leader, and trusted voice who had memorized all 600 pages of the Qur’an while dedicating his life to bearing witness.

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In the hours following the announcement, he became the eyes and ears of the world. Carried above a crowd of thousands, he narrated the scene as it unfolded — the joy, the enthusiasm, the sudden ease and contentment.

It was a moment that arrived “after two years of torment marked by continuous suffering, genocide, displacement, killing, and massacres that had left the people of Gaza powerless,” as he described, smiling ear to ear from the shoulders of a someone in the crowd.

For a brief, fleeting moment, the air was filled with laughter and bliss.

Children danced through the streets, parents wept quietly in relief, and Saleh’s voice carried above it all, broadcasting the joy of a people long denied even a single moment of peace. That fragile happiness in the sky, delicate as glass, seemed almost permanent, as if it had come from a world far removed from the suffering that had defined Gaza for years.

But for him — and for the rest of the world watching — that moment of bliss was short-lived. Just two days after savoring what little relief the ceasefire had allowed, Saleh was shot seven times and killed by an Israeli-backed armed gang — a group funded by the occupying power to sow division and rupture among Palestinians, and in this instance, they did just that.

He had spent the previous two years documenting the destruction of his homeland, the rupture of his own family, and the genocidal campaign against his people. After all of that — when the home stretch seemed near, when “peace” appeared within reach — he was taken from this world.

Saleh al-Jafarawi was the first — and tragically, among the most well-known — of many voices extinguished after the ceasefire. In that tragic moment, his story represented more than another life lost; it was a testament to a people whose moments of hope were fragile, and whose struggle for safety, dignity, and peace endured without pause.

Day One Hundred Four: Mohammed, Abdul Raouf, and Anas

Now, three months later, we are reliving that moment — only this time, the face has changed. On the very day that Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to join the international “Board of Peace,” Israeli forces killed at least eleven Palestinians, including three boys and three journalists, in separate attacks — the most aggressive since the three-month-old ceasefire.

Just a few days prior, the Trump administration announced the initiation of “phase two” of the ceasefire deal. For Palestinians, still waiting for the first phase to be fully and faithfully implemented, it was a fragile glimmer of hope — a momentary sense that something might change, that some respite could exist in a world where nothing is ever given.

Even in that fleeting moment of hope, danger was ever-present — and once again, the cost of bearing witness was paid in blood.

On their way to film a newly established displacement camp in central Gaza’s Netzarim area, Mohammed Salah Qashta, Abdul Raouf Shaat, and Anas Ghneim — three Palestinian journalists who had spent the last two years documenting the same destruction, displacement, and suffering as Saleh once had — had their lives, their work, and their voices cut short when an airstrike tore through their entire vehicle.

In that instant, another thread of Gaza’s story was severed, and another set of witnesses silenced.

Their cameras, like Saleh’s voice, were meant to carry the truth of life under siege, to illuminate the suffering and resilience of a people denied those glimpses of bliss. But yet, just as hope had been brief for Saleh and the rest of the world watching in those moments a few months ago, it is brief for every Palestinian who dares to bear witness: each act of documentation, each attempt to show the world what is happening, is met with the same merciless reality.

Even as Netanyahu takes a seat in the name of diplomacy, blood is spilled under his authority, and the people of Gaza mourn another set of visionaries — taken, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate notes, for refusing to be silenced:

“Targeting journalists while performing their professional duties is part of a policy adopted by the Israeli occupation to silence the Palestinian voice, prevent the transmission of truth, and conceal crimes committed against civilians in the Gaza Strip.”

Once again, Palestinians carry the souls they have lost on their shoulders, their grief heavy but their resilience unbroken.

While politicians stage their theater for the world, in Gaza the price of speaking, witnessing, and simply surviving continues to be counted in blood.

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