This war of revenge has lasted two nightmare years. There’s only one hope for peace: Israel recognising Palestine

A Palestinian boy inspects a car damaged by settlers in Wadi Tiran, the West Bank, November 2023. Photograph: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Being an eternal optimist, I hoped that the events of 7 October 2023 – Hamas’s attack on southern Israel and breaking of the Israeli siege of Gaza – might precipitate a reappraisal of Israeli strategy towards the Palestinians. I hoped Israeli leaders would come to realise the futility of protecting their country by building walls, however impregnable.

Instead, the attack did the opposite. It led to a war of revenge that has now lasted for close to two years, killing more than 65,000 Palestinians and causing the widespread devastation of Gaza, including destroying 92% of its residential buildings. Initially, I was shocked by this, and the dehumanisation of the people of Gaza, which immediately came from Israeli leaders – Yoav Gallant, who was the defence minister at the time of the attack, justified the war by declaring: “We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly.”

I should not have been surprised. For many years, the army has been using similar tactics and language against Palestinians. In April 1983, the Israeli army chief of staff Rafael Eitan likened Palestinians in the West Bank to “drugged cockroaches in a bottle”. Throughout the years of Israeli occupation, house demolitions have also been used as a supposed deterrence as well as shooting innocent people caught in army raids. The walls and checkpoints restricting contact between Israelis and Palestinians pushed the two sides further apart, making it possible to demonise each other even further. Even the ethnic cleansing which Israel is attempting in Gaza is not without precedent. In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes, and Israel’s military carried out dozens of massacres targeting them.

Yet the intensity of the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in Gaza since 7 October has been on a different scale to anything that has happened previously. On the West Bank, we have no previous experience of what it would mean to live next to a state committing genocide against our people and the widespread tolerance of the Israeli people of these actions. We watch in horror what is taking place in Gaza, and also with trepidation. We wonder when our turn will come for the kind of attacks from the air that Gaza has been subjected to.

Confined as we are by hundreds of checkpoints and gates to our small enclave of Ramallah, we have been subjected to repeated attacks by Israeli settlers and the army inside the city itself, which, according to the Oslo accords of 1995, is supposed to be under the full control of the Palestinian Authority and its security force.

It is a constant source of pain to witness more of our land being colonised. The hills around Ramallah are becoming more militarised, with settlers’ outposts being built on high grounds and masked settlers brandishing machine guns roaming the hills, ready to attack anyone daring to take a walk. The sense of danger when venturing to these areas has been heightened.

In August this year, the head of the Israeli army’s central command, Avi Bluth, ordered the felling of around 3,000 olive trees in the village of Al-Mughayyir, in Ramallah, which would have soon been ripe for the autumn harvest. For decades the Israeli military has uprooted olive trees – an important cultural symbol and source of income for Palestinians. The justification for this felling was the claim that the trees posed a “security threat” to a main Israeli settlement road that runs through the village lands. And this week, with the start of the olive-picking season, settler attacks are beginning – as happened last Friday in the village of Farkha, south-west of the city of Salfit.

Soldiers also imposed a siege on Al-Mughayyir and stormed homes there. Bluth explained: “The first mission is to hunt [the assailant] … The second is to carry out shaping operations here, and to ensure that everyone is deterred – not only this village, but every village that tries to raise a hand against the residents [settlers].”

A Palestinian man inspects olive trees reportedly uprooted by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank village of Al-Mughayyir, 24 August 2025. Photograph: Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images

In the past, when confronted with such human rights violations our hope was that we could win some reprieve through the efforts of Al-Haq, the organisation I helped establish 45 years ago. I could never have imagined that it would be sanctioned and prevented from providing the services to our community. We Palestinian have always expected disproportionate repression to our efforts to secure our rights. But the brazenness of this move, combined with its dramatic implications for those in Europe and the United States standing with us, should be a wake-up call for everyone.

I never expected that it would be destroyed by none other than the one-time champion of human rights, the United States of America. It had long been an ambition of mine that the organisation would find a route to prosecuting Israel for its violations. I could not have predicted that helping the international criminal court would be deemed a fatal offence.

In August, the Israeli government gave final approval for the controversial E1 extension of a settlement project which would effectively fragment Palestinian lands, link thousands of illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc, and undermine the viability of a future Palestinian state by ending any chance of a contiguous Palestinian territory.

The international community’s response has been mixed. Citizens in European countries are realising that, should Israel continue to get away with its repeated infringement of international law, this would contribute to the destruction of the rules-based world order. This has motivated many protest groups to indicate their opposition to Israel’s policies against Palestinians. Most recently, hundreds of activists from 44 countries were intercepted on the Freedom Flotilla after setting sail with the intention of breaking the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and delivering aid. However, even with more citizens taking action, their governments remain lethargic, pronouncing tepid criticism of Israel’s actions while continuing to support the state’s war effort.

Yet, despite this disappointing institutional response, the war in Gaza has led to significant changes in the way Israel is perceived worldwide. The fact that the country came into being through the violent displacement of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba has become better understood. So many misconceptions about Israel’s foundation propagated over the past 77 years are being exposed. This has also led to a significant shift in willingness to platform Palestinian voices in spaces which were closed to them in the past.

Following Donald Trump’s proposed “Gaza peace plan”, Hamas has approved the release of all “prisoners of the occupation” and signalled its “readiness to enter into negotiations”. Consequently, Trump has ordered Israel to immediately stop bombing Gaza. If the war were to end and the siege on Gaza were to be lifted, Palestinians have the expertise to rebuild their country. They have the engineers, workers and technicians with decades of experience of working under siege. If they are given access to machinery they could rebuild faster than any external contractor.

There is no doubt about the Israeli army’s fighting capabilities. But Israel must choose between perpetual war or living in peace. This can only happen if the country recognises Palestinian self-determination – a prospect that, at present, seems remote. At the culmination of this war, Israel might end up destroying Gaza, but it will also destroy itself.

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer, and founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. He is the author of What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?