Two years after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, the ceasefire and the return of all living Israeli hostages from Gaza, enabled us to breathe again. While a sense of closure had to wait until the return of Ran Gvili’s body for burial in January 2026, life in Israel had been on the mend for about 4 months from October 2025 until the end of February 2026. We went to sleep at night with some sense of surety that we would not wake up in the middle of the night to sirens, and without the pit in our stomach as we lay awake thinking of those hostages left in Gaza. Though many families were still in mourning over the loss of loved ones while others struggled to meet the challenges of physical and mental trauma wrought by terrorism and war, we began to pick up the pieces of our lives and of our society and imagine a reality without war. The situation for Palestinians in Gaza remained tenuous but even in that seemingly cursed strip of land, some level of optimism for recovery took hold among the displaced as the Trump Peace Plan began to take shape.

This respite from crisis and trauma turned out to be short lived. To remove........

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