Text Ahmad Ibsais | Photo Abed Rahim Khatib
Before October 2023, I never imagined that I could come to understand how a child’s skull opens after being crushed by a building, or the way blood pools, thickens, after snipers take aim at those waving white flags. Two years ago, I never thought I would write about the thousands of ways my people have been killed only to have become as partitioned and broken as the land itself.To be Palestinian is to suffer both the injustice of watching your people die and not being able to stop it. But, to be Palestinian is to also never surrender, to carry your name and your country in your blood. Mahmoud Dawrish once wrote that, “We [Palestinians] suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.” Over the course of these past 24 months, I have come to find new meaning in what it is to be Palestinian. To be Palestinian is to be a world that does not yet exist, it is the possibility that liberation can be made flesh, and what was stolen will someday be reclaimed.
Over 65,000 Palestinians killed, averaging 91 deaths per day for twenty-four months. Independent estimates show a death toll reaching 680,000, primarily children, or even more conservative studies showing over 200,000 murdered. 70% percent of all structures in Gaza destroyed or damaged, including 92 % of housing. Every single university bombed. 95 % of schools damaged or destroyed. Almost 1,600 healthcare workers murdered. Over 1,000 Palestinians seeking aid shot and killed by Israeli forces since May 2025 alone.
Trump’s September 2025 twenty-point plan shows exactly where we are now. The plan destroys the Right of Return while pushing forward the settler colonial project, calling it “peace”. The colonizers’ word for subjugation and death, as long as it stays out of the headlines. Gaza would be placed under a “Board of Peace” run by Trump and Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister who helped destroy Iraq. This trusteeship copies the same colonial management systems Europeans used at the Berlin Conference, through League of Nations mandates, and with UN Trust Territories. Those racist frameworks always treated colonized people like children who needed Western supervision until they could “grow up.” Now they’re trying the same thing again, dressed up as humanitarian aid.
The so-called ‘ceasefire’ is a disgrace. Palestinian journalists like Saleh al-Jafarawi are still murdered. Our people like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remain imprisoned. Israel still occupies 58% of Gaza and maintains its suffocating grip over the West Bank, tightening daily. In this context, the right of return becomes even more imperative. We must reaffirm that the right of return is not negotiable, not conditional, and not subject to the approval of our occupiers. It exists regardless of ceasefires that aren’t ceasefires, regardless of peace plans designed to make our dispossession permanent.
The plan demands Hamas disarm completely and give up any role in Gaza’s governance. Israel keeps the right to meet its “security needs” (nuclear weapons and others of mass destruction), however it wants. An international force enters Gaza, now with a buffer, i.e., more land stolen, and maintains governance. Simultaneously, West Bank cities like Sinjil and villages around Jerusalem are being annexed at rates unseen.
This is colonialism demanding gratitude for chains. The twenty-point plan offers a vague pathway to statehood, never a guarantee, always with conditions, always pushed further away, while locking in permanent foreign control over what’s left of Gaza, and soon the West Bank. The same system that led to the Nakba, now turned into official international policy.
When the Nakba started in 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled: over 50% of the total Palestinian population at the time. Over 400 villages were destroyed, and over 70% of Historic Palestine was stolen. Since then, massacres have dotted our landscape, perpetuating every decade and in-between mass displacements: Deir Yassin in 1948, where pregnant women were bayoneted and children thrown into wells; Kafr Qasem in 1956, where forty-nine farmers returning from their fields were executed in cold blood; Sabra and Shatila in 1982, where thousands of refugees were butchered while Israeli forces provided the floodlights; Jenin in 2002, where bulldozers crushed families alive in their homes; Gaza repeatedly from 2008 to 2025 Each assault more devastating than the last. Each massacre was designed to terrorize Palestinians into accepting permanent exile. Each massacre declared that our return would never be permitted.
And although the world does not act, or takes years to recognise what is clear to those of conscience, Palestinians remain steadfast in our Right of Return. Through the bloodshed, we know the land is calling us back.
I haven’t been home in many years, but I still remember the way the sun feels on my skin. How the warmth somehow feels warmer, and the scent of olive trees and yansoon make every corner store and outside market feel like home. And I still remember the specific shade of blue the sky turned over my grandfather’s land. When I think of home, when I think of Palestine, I above all, think of life. That is what Israel has tried to destroy, life itself.
Genocide is never justified. Genocide is defined as actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It is the highest crime against humanity, prohibited absolutely under international law. There is no context that makes genocide permissible. There is no prior act that renders genocide proportional. To suggest otherwise is to make every colonized group vulnerable to the same fate and to abandon the legal principles established in the ashes of others.
What I understand now, after two years of annihilation, is that the Palestinian right of return was never about their permission. It was never about convincing them of our humanity or waiting for international law to matter. The right of return is our refusal to let them disappear us, even as they try. It is the thread connecting every Palestinian from 1948 to today, the continuous line of steadfastedness that makes us dangerous to their colonial project.
UN Resolution 194 guarantees our right to return to our homes and property, stating that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, establishes the right of everyone to return to their own country. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights makes this binding. UN Resolution 3236 declares the right of return to be “inalienable.” These are legal obligations violated for seventy-seven years while the world has pretended to uphold international law.
The Palestinian right of return has further cemented into customary international law through decades of consistent state practice and opinio juris on the principle of self-determination which evolved from a political aspiration into a binding legal norm. This evolution demonstrates how international law adapts to recognize fundamental human rights that transcend the static boundaries imposed by colonial powers. The right of return flows directly from this established principle of self-determination, which the International Court of Justice has recognized as having an erga omnes character: meaning all states have legal obligations to respect and ensure its implementation, regardless of their bilateral relationships with the parties involved.
Under the doctrine of jus cogens, certain norms of international law are so fundamental that no derogation is permitted. Self-determination increasingly falls within this category of peremptory norms, making violations of Palestinian self-determination not merely treaty breaches but fundamental attacks on the international legal order itself. Israel’s systematic denial of Palestinian return, and life, for seventy-seven years constitutes a continuing breach of international law that triggers these obligations, including active and immediate Military Intervention.
The barrier to our return is that it would require admitting what Israel is: a settler colony built on ethnic cleansing that has spent seventy-seven years perfecting the art of making indigenous people disappear. Our return would require acknowledging that the “only democracy in the Middle East” is actually an apartheid state that has been committing genocide in slow motion since 1948, and rapidly since October 2023.
Israel has tried claiming that the Right of Return is impossible, but, again, they lie. The 1993 Arusha Accords in Rwanda explicitly recognized the “inalienable right” of Tutsi refugees to return after thirty-four years in exile, even though their return would shift the country’s ethnic balance. The 1995 Dayton Accords made refugee return central to the Bosnia peace agreement, stating that “all refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin.” In Cyprus, European courts have consistently upheld Greek Cypriot return claims for fifty years, despite Turkey’s occupation of the north. Kosovo wrote into its 2008 constitution that it recognizes the right of all citizens who lived there before 1998 to return, regardless of their current citizenship or political loyalties.
Palestinians don’t need a precedent to justify what is already ours by right. Genocidal states don’t get to set conditions on their victims’ survival. They don’t get to dictate how we live, where we go, or what we accept as justice. Our return is not subject to Israeli approval any more than Jewish survival was subject to Nazi consent. We will return because this is our land, because international law demands it, and because no amount of violence can make indigenous people disappear permanently.
Our return would prove that indigenous peoples can survive genocide and come home. Our return would give permission to every displaced people on earth to demand the same. Stealing land does not become legal, even if you hold it long enough and kill enough of its people.
We will return because the land remembers our names even when the world refuses to say them. But we will not return as grateful refugees begging for shelter in our own homeland. We will return as a people who survived genocide, who resisted ethnic cleansing, who refused to be erased. We will return with our dignity intact and our rights uncompromised, because anything less perpetuates the colonial rule that created this disaster. You cannot kill an idea whose time has come – from the river, to the sea.
Because I am a stranger
Because Palestine the beloved
is sealed behind skyless air
To her, to it I call: Falasteen
and what returns is the sound
of tires on tank-powdered streets
I feel I have left my throat
in Khan Younis
under the caved-in ceiling
of a bakery where bread once rose
I touch the walls of memory—
only dust clings back
Stones
Stones and no sea salt
and even the waves of Haifa
Stones, and even the scent of Yaffa’s oranges
Stones, steeped in the smoke
of orchard fires
My voice, stone
my teeth, bullet casings
my hands, full of Gaza’s sandbags
stitched with dates we’ll never eat
And my steps
a wind that haunts
a tree outside Beit Hanina—
still holding one last unripe fruit
for a boy who never came back
I Have No Problem With Peace
I have no problem with peace.
It comes in envelopes
in press conferences
in blueprints drawn in offices far from here.
I have no problem with peace —
a gift
wrapped in wire
dropped from planes
planted over the city that became “Tel Aviv”
They say:
Peace is stability
Peace is the quiet hum after a funeral
I have no problem with peace
They give us bread with their left hand
bullets with their right
They draw borders across our ribs
write treaties in the language of warplanes
I have no problem with peace —
except for the bombs that fall mid-sentence
except for the body counts whispered between handshakes
except for the conversations between sword and neck —
the sharp ones Kanafani warned us about
I have no problem with peace —
except for the Ayah that reminds me:
“they call themselves peacemakers
as they sow corruption on the land.”
But I have no problem with peace.
They give it to us daily —
neatly televised
And I am learning to carry it
quietly
like the rest of the dead
I wonder what the Olive Trees would say
After Mahmoud Darwish
I wonder what the olive trees would say if they could talk
I wonder if their roots shrivel at the vibrations of the bombs
I wonder if they too, are scared.
I wonder if the blood of our martyrs reaches their roots. If the olive trees are strengthened by their pursuit for liberation.
Did the olive trees learn of the hands that planted them?
Did our tears help them grow?
I wonder what the olive trees would say
I wonder what it feels like to rest in their shade