This piece is a call for truth. It speaks from the pain of displacement, the rage of injustice, and the sacred memory of those who were silenced. It demands justice before peace — because peace without justice is just another form of violence.

Do you see them?
The ghosts…
do they follow you as you walk by?
Do you hear their footsteps in the dust?

Do the innocent voices of those you’ve killed visit your sleep?
Do their shadows curl around your feet
as you speak of “peace”?

Do you think a land that holds the bodies
of over 20,000 children
will hold you with love?

Do you think the olive trees will feed you,
when you burned the roots that held them?
Do you think the soil will give you life,
when you buried children in its arms?

This land’s soul is connected to its people.
It remembers who loved it,
and who violated it.
It remembers who danced on it barefoot,
and who came with boots and bombs.

You killed the children.

Tiny bodies with wide eyes and soft hands.
They were painting suns with their fingers,
just learning to write their names.

You stole that.

You robbed them of lullabies,
of scraped knees and silly giggles,
of falling in love,
of growing old.

You dropped bombs on their dreams
the ones they whispered before bed,
the ones they drew in crayons,
the ones they never got to live.

Do you think bombs silence memory?
That rubble erases belonging?
Do you think if you displace people, they forget?
If you pay them off, they will forgive?

Do not speak of “voluntary immigration.”
You do not destroy every means of life
every school, every field, every home
and then call exile a “choice.”
Let us name things for what they are:
displacement, coercion, ethnic cleansing
a slow death made to look like an open door.

And when you kill the press,
you think you kill the truth.
But truth does not bleed out with the journalists you target.
It lives in every shattered lens,
every silenced voice,
every buried notebook.

Truth will never hide behind your tanks.
It will seep through the cracks in your lies.
It will rise with the dust.
It will echo in the cries you tried to silence.

You will never have peace.
Not on a land that mourns.
Not on a land that weeps.

A land that holds the bodies of thousands
will never welcome you.
Not when your hands still smell of smoke.
Not when your boots still echo with cries.
Not when the ghosts are still awake.