Mona Khalil, 76, passed yesterday, in a Beirut hospital, from the injuries sustained in a strike on her home, the Orange House, in Mansouri, South of Tyre. Her whole dedication in life was to protect the sea turtles on the coast of Lebanon. She had vowed herself to only do things in this life that made sense and gave her joy.
« She did not only protect turtles, she inspired people. »
To the question asked by an Israeli journalist if it seemed logical that « our soldiers are wounded and killed in the north every week inside what was declared a ceasefire » the Golani commander who led the raid on the Beaufort castle, and seized it without a fight, Lt. Col. Vackert, gave an honest, straightforward answer :
“Listen, this ceasefire never met us along the way. From our perspective, no one told us: you are in a ceasefire with Hezbollah, you are not allowed to fire or advance. We operate quite freely in our sector. We were in the Litani, they said ceasefire, we went out to Beaufort. So that is a discussion in the media. For the maneuvering forces, there is no ceasefire.”
To make his point clearer yet : « You said ‘ceasefire’, from my perspective you said nothing. I hear that discourse and understand that it is not relevant to me. We, in our operations and missions, continue as usual and see no difference. »
To the question whether he saw a « sustainable long-term solution », his assessment is :
Facts seldom considered : There are seven million Jews in Israel. One million are deeply religious, observant, refuse to carry guns and don a State uniform. Another million identify to them. Two million Israelis are Arabs, either Muslims or secular, conscription is not an obligation for them – only a few hundred serve in the army. Another three million Arabs live in the occupied West Bank. Two million more have been penned into the Western ruins of Gaza, whereas the army controls over sixty percent of the rest.
The ceasefire between Gaza and Israel was signed on October 9, 2025, endorsed on October 10. In those eight months, four Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza, and over a thousand Palestinians, more than a quarter of them children.
In those eight months, what has changed for the inhabitants of Gaza, apart from the erratic and regular killing of people ? To this day, they are not allowed materials to repair their demolished houses, schools, public places. The caterpillars used to destroy homes have not been used to remove the rubble. Mentioned in the previous Newsletter, the heat there is stifling, from May till September. What access do they have to running, drinkable water ?
From accountancy to accountability. Another thousand people have been killed in the West Bank since October 2023. [We are talking about people, are we not]. Summary executions.
Not that nobody knows, but the mass media keep sliding from one eruption, one war zone to the next, and we skip along, sticking to perfunctory labels, into oblivion.
S.O.S. ISRAEL / S.O.S. PALESTINE, all in one. Only fourteen million people on this tiny slot of « holy » land, with six more million on that other tiny slot of land called Lebanon.
Do we have to remind that, out of these twenty million human beings, three have been forcibly displaced, to this day, and are now surviving under tents ?
[This is not the land I used to know, until a few years ago. If May 2026 was the worst month in all these years, June is even worse – as the American Vice-President has come to point to the killing madness spreading from South to North. « You can’t just kill your way out of solving » every security problem.]
This orgy of killing is not being performed by deranged criminals, but by law-abiding citizens, upon orders, and laisser faire. Every passing week somehow worse than what came before ? A former Prime Minister (from 2006 to 2009) has spoken out, about the matrix of such growing horror.
You may suspect politicians. Would you suspect witnesses from long-established humanitarian organizations ?
Stop beating about the bush. Take it back to the occupation process. Occupation is occupation is occupation. Occupation : Kibush in Hebrew.
« You may not like the word, but what is happening is an occupation, kibush ze kibush. — to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians, » stated PM Ariel Sharon before the Knesset on May 26, 2003. « It cannot continue endlessly. Do you want to stay forever in Jenin, in Nablus, in Ramallah, in Bethlehem? I don’t think that’s right.”
That was, presumably, twenty-three years ago. That was yesterday. Things have only been going from Charybdis to Scylla since. From the frying pan to the fire.
Take a recent publication, a Loving Dictionary of Israel, by Elie Barnavi – born in Bucarest, author of the remarkable Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, once an Israeli ambassador, commissionned by Ariel Sharon. A « must read », by all means.
All the more as a Loving Dictionary of Palestine has also been published recently, by Elias Sanbar – a Palestinian historian and diplomat of the same generation.
What is striking about Barnavi’s amazing book is that he has decided to make it a testimony about a human country that is no more. « So, what will you find there ? Characters [the dead only – for reasons that need no comment, I spared the living], places, doctrines, facts… which, together draw a portrait of the Jewish state.» How can you draw such a compelling portrait without today’s people ?
Will it be disregarded for being focused on ‘the past’ ? Beware that « the past is never dead, it is not even past »
Elias Sanbar (born in Haifa, in what they call Mandatory Palestine) was photographed with Stephane Hessel (Time for Outrage ! 2010) on the picture below. What Sanbar has to say about the possibility of peace, remote as it feels : « to make peace is something extremely violent. »
«The transitions can be risky if they don’t open the door to changes, if they don’t transform mindsets, do not provide us with small daily proof that the choice made was the good one. »
Let’s face it : it’s either self-destructive violence, or self-constructive violence from now on. We still have to deal with the human matrix of chaos, separatism, segregation and death.
Surviving on borrowed time, making peace
with ourselves is around the bend for all of us…/….
UNDER THE HEAT DOME S.O.S. ISRAEL / LEBANON (3) S.O.S. PALESTINE (3)
Dedicated to Torsten Wiesel, Elias Corey, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Dalai Lama, Roald Hoffmann, Mario Capecchi
& to the loving memory of Desmond Tutu, Ilya Prigogine, Joseph Rotblat, Maurice Wilkins, Christian de Duve, Jack Steinberger, François Jacob, of Martin Luther King & Thich Nhat Hanh
1- Under the Heat Dome
« For the fifth time this summer, Europe is sweating under an intense heat wave. The signs of a persistently hot and exceptionally dry summer are everywhere. Brown, dusty patches have replaced verdant lawns in London’s parks. Major rivers like the Danube and the Rhine have retreated, exposing sandbars. The conditions have created a tinderbox for wildfires. Forests in Germany and in Bosnia and Herzegovina were ablaze on Friday, while firefighters were battling to save thousands of acres and hundreds of homes in Britain, France, Greece and Spain. »
Heat is Hammering Europe Again, The New York Times, August 14, 2026
4 a.m. in the cool of the night, somewhere in Europe. The earth is parched and scorched, all former green spaces are withered, yellowish, dusty. Under the lime tree you walk on a dry, crispy carpet of dead bracts, dead Tilia fruit, the likes of which you had never seen in a lifetime. You can feel the suffering of trees. It has not really rained for weeks on end. Not even thinking of the thousands of them which were engulfed in forest fires.
As for the feeding function of fields, we know that wheat harvests are going down.
Sixteen thousand people died from the heat during one peak week of June in Europe.
Hundreds of thousands have since been in slow, silent agony. You should take the subway in London or Paris to check out on faces. We know it isn’t any better in New York with temperatures close to 90°F, Memphis or Dallas (over 100°F in the afternoon). 95°F in Hanoi, 88°F in Saigon and Gaza.
Some cities are blessed with temperatures in their seventies, depending on the waters next to them, the altitude. The Question of the Place and Climate. Die Frage nach Ort und Klima, more than ever. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888).
This is a whole brand new world out here. Much more serious than the covid pandemy. We’re actually suffocating, sweating and frying, gasping for breath. Forget what Miller called The air-conditioned nightmare (1940-1945). Breathe. Consciously. Deep consciousness, and cognition. On the way to conscientious objection.
Conscience and consciousness, two faces of the same coin.
A Call to Conscience. Martin Luther King (December 5, 1955-April 3, 1968)
First, breathe. Deliberately inspire.
One of the lessons learnt in Middle Bosnia, during their civil war : if you want to survive, you got to think fast, act slowly. Slowly : deliberately, in full mindfulness.
You might as well resort to Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman (2011).
Or, shorter, simpler yet, on the threshold of the oven, of the furnace, or one step into it, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh (1975). Wisdom from Vietnam. 1975, the year the U.S. mighty army had to finally go home, with all their B52 bombers, Huey helicopters, Patton tanks, after they had lost 47,434 lives in combat, and killed three million Vietnamese out of forty million then, during the twelve years of their full military involvement. Have we forgotten the many lessons of Vietnam and its Fog of War ?
Now there are over a hundred million human beings in Vietnam. With a fertility rate slightly under 1,9, whereas it has fallen to 1,6 in the US, Australia, New-Zealand (and France). [Underneath 1,5 for Russia, Germany, Cuba, Switzerland, the Netherlands, for that matter ; underneath 1,4 for Canada, Austria, Greece ; underneath 1,3 in Spain, Japan, Italy…].
So, that is where we are now, in insidiously dying peoples, caught within persistent heat domes, with Millennials and the Z generation that seem to have lost the lust to live and transmit.
By the way, if you care to wonder, the vitality rate is of 4,3 in Yemen, 3,13 in Iraq and Palestine, 2,7 in Israel and Egypt, 2,6 in Syria, 2,5 in Jordan, 2,2 in Lebanon (but 1,66 in Iran). In Israel proper, among the religious Jews, you count close to 7 children per family, as opposed to around 2 among secular couples. Go figure.
2- S.O.S. ISRAEL/GAZA
Why should we start this Letter with the richest party, aware that the Gross Domestic Product per capita / Purchasing Power Parity in Israel is close to $ 70,000 (IMF source for 2026) whereas in Gaza it fell down to $161 a year at the end of 2023. Did you know ?
A ratio Gaza/Israel of 1,6 to 700 : of 0,22 to 100.
The average monthly wages in Gaza today are around$100. 85 €.
Whereas the Tel Aviv beaches are filled with suntanned scantily clad crowds, the Gaza beaches are covered with refugees’ shabby tents, displaced families who’ve been surviving in tents for three years. Barely some forty miles away in straight-line. Not to speak of the Ashkelon beaches, a dozen miles North of Gaza City.
Again, how do you fancy this, surviving with $100 per month– if you get lucky. about 85 €.
Just facts and figures. No a priori, no bias. Facts speak louder than speeches.
Granted that some remain stuck in the distant past, were the Germans forced to survive with under two hundred euros a year until 1948 ? Or the Hiroshima people, for that matter ?
Check it out. Look around. The poorest people on Earth, in Yemen, forty million Muslims live with about $ 300 per month – is this why they feel such instant solidarity with the Gaza people ? In South Sudan, thirteen million people have to survive with $ 130 per month. By the way, South Sudan was created ex nihilo, carved out of Sudan, in 2011, fifteen years ago.
Comparatively, Palestine has been vying for statehood since 1988, close to forty years now, and who knows where the files of its statehood have been spirited away ?
So, again, why should little Israel take provisory precedence (S.O.S. Israel) over its Palestinian counterpart at this stage ?
Now the heat is rising here, in this tiny office (two square meters). 77°F. No ventilator. Still, we have running water and electricity. What would it be under a thin layer of material under the sun, in a refugees’ tent, reaching 90 to 100°F ?
You need to know something : the Gaza people are very ordinary people. Among them you find employees, students, architects, shopkeepers, waiters, nurses, teachers, masons, surgeons, the whole usual range. I can testify about it, after working there in education for six years. You did meet ideologues and dogmatic civil servants, leaders – whose sin was to blindedly believe in the armed struggle, without ever weighing the schematics of interactions, the whole gamut of consequences / but who really does that anyway ?
The vast majority of the people were peaceful, busy with making ends meet, studying, passing exams. I stayed there long enough, walked the walk, observed all of them in daily life. I can testify.
As can be seen, I took this picture at the end of July 2011, on a beach in the North of Gaza, during the day-long gathering of thousands of kids, brought in buses by UNRWA young monitors, in an attempt to beat the Guinness record of the most kites flown simultaneously, until then held by Chinese kids, with some 11,000 kites, if my memory serves me well.
And guess what, on that last Thursday of July 2011, these beautiful, innocent kids of Gaza, gathered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency teams at al-Waha Beach, did win, with 12,350 kites flown simultaneously ! Guess what too, the wind from the South was blowing towards Israel. Al-Waha Beach is less than one mile from the border with Israel.
Fifteen thousand kids guided by the UNRWA teams. This was Gaza to me. Of these fifteen thousand kids of 2011, how many of them were killed, or maimed, in the last three years ?
How did the media North of the border report the event ? Could you find one reference ?
So, yes, pity the Northern neighbours, who were not told, not informed, who could not seeany picture of these 12,350 flying messages of peace and joyful hope. S.O.S. Israel too.
The underground war machine in Gaza was something else, a secret forbidden kingdom in its own right, that nobody was allowed to penetrate, that nobody would talk about, that was just surmised. You had two distinct worlds in Gaza : the surface life, and the underground. A few hundred men, at most, knew, and would go back and forth between the two. The rest of the population prefered not to know, not to inquire.
How many times, in all these years, did I ask leaders, insisting to visit a smuggling tunnel to Egypt? Again and again, I was denied any possibility of access. Speaking of the Westward tunnels, not the taboo ones to Israel.
3- S.O.S. June-July-August 2026 / S.O.S. LEBANON
In June 2026 we sent three S.O.S. messages worldwide, to Nobel laureates (standing for common sense and unstoppable human progress). S.O.S. ISRAEL / S.O.S. LEBANON / S.O.S. PALESTINE. In the background, you could read S.O.S. IRAN. Refering to the people, not the state-nations as such. Their explicit end was to express conscientious objection to warfare in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran, in the West Bank – and in Israel, as a tidal effect.
We were sinking fast then. In Lebanon, twelve children were killed and maimed daily, even after the Hezbollah-Israel truce was agreed, in the wake of a U.S.-Iran deal reached on June 15, including ‘Immediate Termination’ of any fighting in Lebanon.
You noticed that half our sources are from Lebanon, L’Orient Today, We started following them in March 2026, as they offer insight from inside, less state-controlled than the media in Egypt or Jordan. This is part of the approach here : if you want to get a less biased view of what is going on, you have to leave the fast highway of comfort zone media, and cross borders. You have to listen to what the others concerned have to say, the Lebanese, the Egyptians, the Saudi Arabs, the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Turks, the Iranians, the United Nations people…
You do not escape wild fires and dangers through blinders and cervical rigidity.
Now, seemingly, the United Nations has lost much of its weight and influence, to be supplanted and replaced by the United States. Not quite the same vision of Unity or Union. Judge by the results, What does this brave new world order look like ?
Before the summer of 2026, who could put names on the fifteen key Middle East countries ? Before April 2026, who knew where the Hormuz Strait lies ?
Before July 2026, who on Earth knew where the Bab el Mandeb Strait is, and what countries border it ? Before March 2026, who knew what the neighbours of Iran are ? Or even how many people live in Iran, for that matter ?
Americans are known to be wholly ignorant of world geography. Are Europeans any better ? Who has any idea, anyway, of how many US military bases there are in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, up to Turkey and Cyprus ?
The following selection of articles from nine sources (3 American, 4 Israeli, 1 Lebanese, 1 British) may read like a descriptive chronology for July 2026 :
Susannah George, The Washington Post, August 15, 2026
Paradoxically, this fourth part which was labeled S.O.S. Lebanon to start with, ends up practically defined as S.O.S. USA.
5- To Conclude for Now – as of mid-August 2026
As far as we can see from what precedes, this thing, the March 1 Attack, is not working.
The March 1 Attack : the massive aerial assault on Iran by the Israeli-American alliance.
It is not working, from a technical, objective point-of-view.
A complex equation, indeed, with fifteen players involved (the Gazan, the Israeli, the American / the Lebanese, the Iranian, the Omani / the Yemeni, the Saudi, the Egyptian / the Jordanian, the Syrian, the Iraqi / the Pakistanese, the Chinese, the Russian). All revolving around the historical hinge : Gaza.
A simple obvious truth : we have burning issues to deal with, all of us. The Water warming problem and the Droughts, as existential priorities. The recurring oppressive Heat waves. Did you know that four days ago, on August 11, both in 2025 and 2026, tons of jellyfish clogged the cooling system, impaired the functioning of the largest nuclear plant in Europe ? The connection : warming seas favor the reproduction of jellyfish.
Other than from invasions of jellyfish, « France has seen nuclear power production disrupted by multiple heatwaves and droughts this year, with EDF shutting down several reactors in June and July because of extreme heat. » Le Monde, August 11, 2026
In this glaring light, the Middle East is far from pressing concerns for North America and Europe.
Take another look at the maps : the days of MM. Sykes and Picot’s agreement to share the land from Kirkuk to Beirut according to British and French interests (1916), the days of Colonel Lawrence, have long been gone. And history has taught us that the Americans, when they step in, don’t do any better than the British and the French – from Vietnam (1963-1975) to Iraq (1990-2003).
« Do they know history ? »
Facing growing emergency situations provoked by excessive heat, and the rising numbers of climate refugees ; since this thing of an endless war – from Ukraine to Iran and Israel/Lebanon/Palestine – is not working, we have to ask whose interest these protracted wars really serve, apart from the main beneficiaries among arms-producing companies.
Do we have to ask, or is it that we’d rather not investigate (among the Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences, who has been researching the field ?) ? The list of war profiteers yet is no state secret, it’s out there, in the open, for all to find out :
Some of these companies draw over 90% of their total revenues from arms revenues. To name but eight of them : Transeuropean KNDS (100%) and MBDA (99%) ; the French Naval Group (98%) ; the Israeli Rafael group (98%) ; the British BAE Systems (95.4%) ; the American Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Israeli Elbit Systems (92%) ; the American Lockheed Martin Corporation (91%).
Forget the big notions for a moment.
Remember the Vietnam veteran who turned from a fighter to a preacher when he came back home , his pledge more than fifty years later : « I’m sick of the war. I’ve been in combat and seen the destructive nature that people assume the longer they are in war. »
We’re all sick of these wars. It’s all too much, much more than we can live with normally. What war does to you, even if you are not in a combat zone, and too old or too young to carry a gun : they waste your everyday life, they waste your precious time on earth. Filling your saturated mind with false news, angst and worries – how will it all end ?will it ever end ?
It is our job, one and all, to tend to the first victims of war, truth and trust.
Restore them, redeem them.
Opening the doors in the heart of the night, to let the cool in.
Learning to live a new way of life, step by step.
No need to panic. No need to repress or suppress.
No time to waste. Three affirmative Nos.
The good news is in the news, once you get the broad picture, in depth.
Sapere Aude. Dare to Know. Knowledge leads to courage – and vice versa.
The risk was to drown into toxic disgust, of voluntary servitude and ignorance.
Rushed into recurrent emergency modes, to escape this spiral of a distorted sense of time, we should celebrate the present instant of acknowledgment. Reassess priorities, pivotal shifts.
Redefine shelter and shadow, refuge and fortress, shield and rampart…
Not willing to close mind and ears out of confusion, but rather to reopen them slowly, deliberately. Stronger, more focused, as we seize and strengthen every instant of awareness.
To heal the destructive nature that we all assume the longer we live through unwanted wars, re-energize with strong multiplier effects of the instant.
Redeem the moment, to stop the self-defeating sprees.
“Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don’t need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness.” The Colossus of Maroussi Aware of this fact, we proceed with a vigilant selection of “everything that’s really fit to post.”
This is the second series of S.O.S. we are sending. In the midst of the frightful night. The time now is 4 :19 a.m.. There is no artificial intelligence behind this. It is only human. Whoever you may be, you will recognize the human nature of real voices. We are sinking. Human lives are lost. Scores are threatened.
We sent the first series eight units ago, to 175 Nobel destinatories worldwide, connected to all companies. Only three answered. Offering reception and understanding. One said it was « dark everywhere » The next one, a Peace vessel, answered to « keep up ». The last one, another Peace vessel, sounded helpless. « I don’t even know what to say… I feel a deep scream in my soul… the words escape me… »
We are no part of the Sumud flotilla, as we share a different worldview. Theirs is too restricted to us, unilateral, antagonizing – but stating this will antagonize some, and there is no time for that. There is no time. No time left. Pass it on. Lives are at stake. Pass it on.
It’s the growing extension of the warfare state. The spreading of what radical muslims call the dar al-harb, war territory. It covers more and more space. From Mar Elias church in Damascus, the Manchester synagogue, England, and the Bondi Beach massacre, Australia, to the Islamabad mosque attack in Pakistan in February this year.
Open the scope. Unlockdown yourselves. S.O.S. GAZA :
Is this picture from Gaza or Lebanon ? Emaciated and hardened as the child is, it must be from Gaza. How many like him ? Twenty thousand children disappeared, blown up into blood and dust in two years. Omnipresent ossuary in the horrendous stenchy ’open’.
What’s it gonna take ? Have we forsaken our own humanity ?
The heat in Gaza is stifling, starting in May. 80% humidity. Hundreds of thousands living in tents.
Last message from Gaza as of June 8 :
‘[…] They have just targeted a flat in our area and there are a number of casualties. We are not safe. They allow little food and expensive as well. We cannot afford to buy fruits or vegs, which means another face of the starvation and hunger. ‘
When a shell comes close, you wonder where the next one is going to hit, closer, and whether the one after that may hit you. Do they have real targets, or is it just some sick boy playing with his rich boy’s toys ? Or obeying whose orders ?
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, May 30, 2026 / Ahmad Tibi, September 16, 2025
Suspicious, biased ? By the end of May, the army was ordered to take over 70% of the Gaza Strip. Over two million survivors squeezed into slightly over 100 square kilometers of rubble and ruins. Where do we go from here ?
[Should I, should we go to Lebanon now ? To Beirut, Tyr… A straight flight costs over a thousand euros. One stop-over through Turkey is half-price. You have to see for yourself, with your own eyes… A French delegation of MPs and MEPs did the job lately, meeting President Aoun and a whole array of people – if they managed to make it, why should not others ? Courage emulates.]
S.O.S. ISRAEL? How dare we focus on Israel now, in the wake of what it inflicts upon its neighbours, with its thousand drones (one third of them attack drones), its 600 American bombers and helicopters, its two thousand tanks ?
For the sake of friends and loved ones, on both sides of the divide. Intertwined as they all are. Who remembers there are two million Arab Israelis, living right next to, in the midst of some seven million Jews – almost twenty percent of them so religious that they refuse to carry a gun, let alone serve in the army ?
Forgo abstractions, labels and speeches, a prioris and flags.
Wherever you look around, all you see is people.
From America, I received this other s.o.s. message, from a dear one who served in the Marines in Viet-Nam, and who chose to become a preacher when he returned :
« I’m sick of the war. I’ve been in combat and seen the destructive nature that people assume the longer they are in war. »
If you wonder what that means, you can check it up with observers, witnesses willing to testify, Hazel Brief, Adam Rasgon, Or Hadar, Gid’on Lev, Nir Gontarz, Yael Lee, Ella Ben Emanuel, Manuela Dviri, Rossella Tercatin :
[How I’d love to forget it all, just let it be, not return…Let it all drown deeper and deeper, out of sight, sickening as it has become…Healing through oblivion… But then, what of my dearest friends, Najib and his family in Sebastiya ; Adam, Ava and their three teenage sons in Haïfa ; Malik in Balata ; Arik in Jerusalem ; my shelter at one of the Gates of the Old City; Ran and the other Nir Oz refugees in Kyriat Gat… Amir, Mahdi, Abdennour, and their families, in Gaza…] Listening to Yael Lee, whose son is a ‘combat engineer’ in Lebanon : ‘I have a weight on my heart all the time. All the time.[…] in the end it’s very clear that there is nothing to do except lie down and pray [facing drones]. It’s really like they’re sitting ducks. […] overall, in this country, in this government, there is no one watching over him, he’s of no interest to anyone. These kids are simply cannon fodder. But that’s how I raised him. Partly out of stupidity, and partly out of naivete. And this country really was different. […] I truly believed that human lives were important. I truly believed we were peace-seeking. I truly believed that war was only a last resort. I truly believed that after every war would come dialogue and there would be an agreement, and that there would be an end to this madness.’
[Right now, I have but one wish, to be allowed to return to Gaza, after visiting my friends in Nir Oz, Kyriat Gat, be able to meet and hug those whom I know in Gaza, whom I miss, and fear for. Given that I am granted a permit, like before, how shall I stand the amount of devastation ? How can we restore life and care ?]
[Every day, there is just too much chaos rushing in, from all directions. We also hear about ceaseless fire in Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria… Still, Gaza and Jerusalem remain the hinge between the continents and peoples, Muslims, Jews, Christians. Caught in time as we all are, we are only striving to stop the murderous flows feeding on indifference and ignorance. Restore the minimal trust and common sense to make people feel better.
As Mahdi wrote, in Gaza, « we are determined to live and exist regardless of the pain and suffering. » The day his daughter Hayat got engaged, he added : « we could force ourselves to smile and be happy.’ As he also wrote at the end of 2025 :
‘[with] your help and support… You encourage us to smile and live. You indeed heal our wounds and alleviate our suffering.’]
Can we still endure much more than we think we can ? We are losing lives. As if doctors and surgeons did not already have their hands filled with cases in ordinary life ! So, by all means, pass it on. Let your scream out. Pass it on. Make peace happen.
For now, we’re running out of vital fuel. Hopefully, we’ll emit again soon. There is more you should know about the way the whole thing is unraveling. When we say, we are sinking, it is not just an image. It is a slow, insidious process. May 2026 was the worst we’d been through in all these years. June isn’t looking any better. But there’s talk of an imminent agreement between the POTUS and the Islamic Republic of Iran . Check on our lifeline :
Where can we go from here ? Silence and dismay do not apply.
Dear Nobel/noble mind and friend,
Always grateful for your echoes, up to the last one, of May 11 : « Dark those prospects are, but you, Yacov, have faced such darkness before. Keep working for peace.
And there are moments of hope and joy… »
I know you have faced much darker times than I ever have, as an infant during such a terrifying period of humankind. Yuval Harari, in his 2018 essay 21 Lessons for the 21st century, claimed, to start the WAR chapter : « The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history » – but the subtitle is Never underestimate human stupidity. He is rated as one of the most brilliant minds worldwide. So maybe he should be listened to in his latest interview – have you read it ?
Notably that part which says : “If you look at the way that Israel is treating the Palestinians, not in Gaza but in the West Bank, there is no security justification for that,” he said. “They did not attack Israel on Oct. 7. And by Israel’s actions, the chance that there will be a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians is decreasing.”
The way that Israel is treating the Palestinians in the West Bank ? The day we met in Tel Aviv, March 7, 2025, when I left you, so happy feeling we could have met, I received a call from Nablus : the most important mosque there, the Al Naser mosque, had been torched in the night by a rogue platoon.
Did you hear about it ? Did anyone in the West hear about it ?
Al Naser mosque ? Think of the Sacred Heart in Paris, Saint Paul in London.
Not just the fact that it had been raided and set fire to, but that this was not covered by the media.
In Iran the ceasefire was agreed on April 8, almost two months ago. Is this what a ceasefire feels like ? In Gaza, the ceasefire was decreed on October 10, 2025. Eight months ago.
Over nine hundred persons have been killed in Gaza since the day of that ceasefire. Forty of them children and women.
If not by going there, crossing the lines, from keeping our mind open to a number of sources : The Jerusalem Post, The New York Times, The Times of Israel, Ynet News, UN News, but also L’Orient Today, the BBC, Al Arabiya, Haaretz, China Global, the Tehran Times, the Jordan Times… Open the range, not to remain trapped in any one zone of comfort.
Not « only » the people, a vast majority of civilians, killed and maimed in Gaza after the ceasefire, but over two million human beings surviving in rubble and pestilence. « Nearly the entire population remains displaced and concentrated “into a progressively narrower strip of land”, with multiple displacement orders issued in recent days. « (UN News, May 29, 2026).
I know Gaza. I know Gazans. As a civilian myself.
Over a quarter of a century I have been involved in Israel and Palestine. My first pilgrimage, voyage was in the late eighties during the First Intifada. I spent time in Gaza then. The level of hatred was so high. Gaza was a dangerous place to be in the eighties for a stranger. Who remembers the War of Stones ? Now we have gone from stones to drones, and they fly from the North.
Who remembers that this first uprising lasted five years and nine months, to be concluded with the Oslo Accords in September 1993, opening the way to a solution of Palestinian sovereignty within five years – before the end of the century ?
What have the children born since the start of the Second Intifada, September 2000, known ?
Who remembers this second uprising lasted four years and four months ?
How many times did the army rush into the Gaza Strip, with full might, tanks and bombers, shells and missiles ? Four wars are recalled. 2008-2009. 2012. 2014. 2021. To culminate in 2023-2025.
What have the Gaza children born after the 2005 Israeli disengagement known ?
Gaza was a dangerous place in the eighties, but when I returned, for a few years, from 2008 to 2013, with an Israeli permit, it was different. I loved Gaza. Simply. Its people, its youth, their good-natured smiles, their seriousness, their warmth. Blockaded as it was, it still was a happy place – in between army raids. The 2014 war burnt the bridge for me.
Yet, the peace seeds we planted there, as a humanitarian non-governmental organization, seemed to sprout in 2018. It was even printed in the New York Times. David Halbfinger wrote about it, April 15, 2018. « It was a striking tableau… » said he. Gardeners missing down the line though.
We’re all taught the codes and languages of business, management, math, physics and all, but where do they teach the basic lexicon and grammar of listening and coexisting ? Where on earth ?
This is what we find in Gaza today, both soldiers and civilians :
Have I known such darkness before ? Not in my years. Through the murderous insanity in Bosnia in the nineties, in Kosovo at the turn of the century, during the Second Intifada into 2005, then in Algeria, the « dark decade » – this being the field of my personal experience in war zones – no, I have known nothing of the sort. Never known such spreading darkness.
Bosnia 1993-1996, Kosovo 1999, Palestine & Israel 2000-2005, Algeria until 2002, the pits of evil somehow were filled again with rationality, and the warring groups came to a closure, for the sake of survival and common sense. Kosovo was even torn away from Serbia, and decreed a sovereign state in 2008, recognized as such by 110 countries worldwide – ever since, peace has prevailed between Serbia and sovereign Kosovo.
Here, the evil that flared up in October 2023 with the Palestinian attack from Gaza has culminated in some seventy five thousand deaths, some fifty thousand of them women and children. In February-March 2026, this horrifying evil has metastasized into more war, more devastation, into Iran, and Lebanon, to this very day.
3,371 people killed, over ten thousand wounded, in Lebanon, since March 2. 1.2 million people ‘displaced’,were forced away from their homes, out of six million – can you imagine ? Twenty percent of Americans, that would mean close to seventy million people on the roads, or sixteen million Germans for that matter. You tell me what it means.
So, you bomb and displace, North and South, just because you have the means to do it, without the least shred of awareness, awareness of consequences ? And you cover up reality, under the guise of speeches about freedom vs terrorism ?
Treating people like abstract pawns in a video game, like cattle to the slaughterhouse.
Is this how you define the defence of democracy in a free society ?
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In loving memory of Vivian Silver (center front) who died an atrocious death in her burning shelter on October 7, 2023.
This picture was taken in October 2016, when Women Wage Peace walked through Israel, from North to South, East to West, from Dimona to the Gaza Wall here. I was there, with them.
Eighteen months before the preceding picture, taken behind the wall, within the Gaza Strip, with Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mandela. Ismael Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, 2024.
How long till we all become blind, from the Eye for an Eye virus ?
S.O.S. LEBANON :
« You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have. »
You may suspect politicians. Would you suspect witnesses from long-established humanitarian organizations ?
Knesset on May 26, 2003. « It cannot continue endlessly. Do you want to stay forever in Jenin, in Nablus, in Ramallah, in Bethlehem? I don’t think that’s right.”
What is striking about Barnavi’s amazing book is that he has decided to make it a testimony about a human country that is no more. « So, what will you find there ? Characters [the dead only – for reasons that need no comment, I 
spared the living], places, doctrines, facts… which, together draw a portrait of the Jewish state.» How can you draw such a compelling portrait without today’s people ?
The transitions can be risky if they don’t open the door to changes, if they don’t transform mindsets, do not provide us with small daily proof that the choice made was the good one. »
violence, or self-constructive violence from now on.
