Dear Friend,
As a joint movement committed to nonviolence and to ending the occupation through political means, we firmly reject the belief that expanded military force will bring safety or stability to our region. But why do we feel like this?
A few days ago in the West Bank, two Palestinian brothers were shot and killed by settlers in the village of Qaryut, part of a documented rise in settler violence and displacement that human rights organizations and UN monitors have repeatedly warned the world about. Such attacks are not isolated eruptions of chaos; they unfold within a system of occupation that fragments Palestinian life, weakens accountability, and entrenches a reality of unequal rights that corrodes any genuine prospect for peace.
In Israel, civilians have been killed and injured by Iranian missile strikes on residential areas, a stark reminder that when confrontation escalates between states, it is ordinary people who absorb the consequences. International humanitarian law is unequivocal: civilians must never be targeted, and indiscriminate attacks on populated areas are unlawful. As governments invoke deterrence and security to justify their actions, Israeli and Iranian families mourn loved ones as the confrontation spreads. Official statements speak in strategic terms; on the ground, it is grief that endures.
We refuse the hierarchy of grief that measures one life against another, and we reject the logic that treats civilian deaths as currency in a wider struggle. What binds these realities together is not only escalation between states, but the political structures that normalize and perpetuate harm - occupation, annexation, collective punishment, and regional brinkmanship that treats civilian lives as leverage rather than as equal human beings entitled to protection and dignity.
Moral clarity at this moment requires holding these truths together: opposing attacks on civilians everywhere while confronting the underlying reality of occupation, oppression and entrenched injustice that makes repeated escalation inevitable. Expanding war will not resolve either; it will only prologue the suffering.
If we are serious about protecting civilian life, we must be serious about ending the systems that endanger it.
In hope,
Rana Salman Eszer Korányi
More to schwelle-Projektpartner Combatants for Peace
