September 21 is a painful reminder of the urgent necessity of peace in our increasingly warring world. In his remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the guns are still blazing in our fractured world. Nowhere is this more evident than in Gaza. For decades, a narrow strip of land has come to symbolise the collective failure of the international community. Instead of becoming a bridge between peoples, Gaza has been reduced to rubble this time. Its children have been robbed of their dreams and thousands of families have been forced into endless cycles of grief since last year. The humanitarian catastrophe and famine in Gaza today is not just a byproduct of war; it is the sad outcome of political inertia amid the US’s complicity in giving a free pass to Israel while ignoring its own failure to live up to the ideals of peace which it has been promoting to the world. Blockades and airstrikes by Israel have killed thousands Aimee last year. Mass displacement underway have turned Gaza into an endangered species which faces the threat of being completely erased from the map. Each new flare-up kills hundreds including children and leaves behind physical and psychological wounds. It is not only infrastructure that is destroyed, but the very idea that Palestinians can even exist. The world can’t stay silent. Temporary ceasefires have acted as bandages on a festering wound which can’t replace a political solution. The only viable path forward remains what has long been acknowledged but persistently postponed two-state solution. This means a secure Israel living side by side with an independent, sovereign Palestinian state. Anything short of this’d will keep the region locked in a cycle of retaliation and reprisal. For Israel, peace will never come from overwhelming military dominance alone; for Palestinians, justice will never be found in perpetual resistance without a political horizon. Without recognizing each other’s right to exist, both peoples are condemned to endless bloodshed. Some may argue that a two-state solution has been distorted by realities on the ground which includes Israeli settlement expansion and dispossession of Palestinians. Which is why, the longer the world waits, the more distant peace will becomes and more innocent lives will be lost. On this International Day of Peace, Guterres’s appeal should serve as a global call for justice. The world must exert real pressure—diplomatic, economic, and political— on the US to press Israel to restart negotiations with seriousness of purpose to make the two state solution a reality. The children of Gaza deserve more than a shattered childhood. The women of Gaza deserve to live with dignity. Israeli families too deserve security without fear. And only the US can make it a reality.
