These words are written by Mohammed Hureini, a Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta (South Hebron Hills), after he was unjustly arrested on August 5th, 2023, while grazing on his land.

I was grazing our sheep when a group of illegal Israeli settlers invaded our land and started harassing me. They also had some sheep that they unleashed to graze in our land. When I tried to stop them, they called the Israeli army, who immediately came. The army had already prepared a military order entailing that our private land is a closed military area before they joined the settlers. To enforce the military order, which only applies to us, the Israeli commander notified us that we have to leave the land within a few minutes.
I refused and insisted that the settlers should leave our land first. Israeli soldiers responded by handcuffing and blindfolding me. The Israeli commander tightened the handcuffs to hurt me and tried to humiliate and provoke me. I shouted at him and said, “What are you doing? I am not a toy in your hands to treat me like this.” He replied, “Shut up!”
At around 8.00 PM they took me to the military base near the village of Susiya. I could find out about this through a hole that was in the piece of cloth covering my eyes. When we arrived in the military base, they threw me in a yard, where there was a soldier watching me.

Operazione Colomba, the years spent in Lebanon, Humanitarian Corridors and the solidarity shown in these years have taught me a lot and opened many new paths.
They taught me a unique way to live certain situations and when to give space to others.
I saw a world of tragedies caused by human violence, but also the solidarity and closeness that grows within them.
Twenty days ago, I heard of a big shipwreck, 750 people left Libya and only a hundred survived, a hundred corpses were found, while the others... were lost at sea.
Shortly after I talked with a friend who arrived years ago in Italy from Lebanon through the Humanitarian Corridors: his cousin Mohamad, 24 years old, was on the ship.
He is among those unaccounted for.
Several friends intervene to help and one of them accompanies the relative of the missing person in Greece to search for answers.
There, along with the volunteers from Operazione Colomba, information was exchanged and listened to in order to see what can be done.
In the meantime, I have arrived in Lebanon and learned that Mohamad’s parents are here, living just a couple of hours by car from where we stay.
They are our friend’s uncles, parents of a desaparecido in the deadliest border of the world, refugees in a country that barely hosts them while they can’t return to their country of origin.
Operazione Colomba is what can’t make you flee facing other people's pain, but instead it whispers “get closer, try to feel even a small fraction of what they are feeling, don’t run away, even if it’s painful and even if you don’t have an answer”.

I left to try to give a concrete Peace response to the war.
Here, after more than a year, young people are tired: they were resisting and looking for a different way but now they are giving up, they think it's not working, they don't see great results and they believe that the only thing left to do is to enlist.
To fight, so that the war ends as soon as possible or just to avoid being pervaded by a sense of futility.
So, I asked myself what the next step was, how to help them not to give up.
What concrete step can they take against the war?
Actually, they are already doing it, they are taking big steps against violence, but they need to be told!
The part that is missing is mine.
We alone do not see things; the other people make us see.I have to tell their life, and tell them that I see it, that their resistance is the great cry that they want to live and they do not want war.
They are living and not fighting with weapons, and that is right!
They are living by sharing what little they have in their destroyed villages.
They are seeking Peace, they have already created it, they are living it.

Vika is 18 years old. We met her in Mykolaiv two months ago at the community shelter where we live. She arrived from Kherson with her mother.

K. brings his hand to his chest. His fingers will forever be marked by the hammer blows he received during his nine years in prison in Syria.
He sighs, trying not to let it show.
The check-point is now behind him as he goes home by bus.
During this period of summary deportations, which has worsened over the past month, it is difficult to know how many, at the same check-point, have been met with a different fate.

The father of A., 23, learned that his son was stopped there only because he was informed by someone who recognized him at the location on the Syrian border where the deportation occurred.
He was with about 30 people. Nothing more was heard of A. for two days. Then the news.
He is in prison in the country he left when he was 14.
“They cannot take him for compulsory military service because he is the only son. They should release him, but who knows what they did to him. If they asked him where his family is, we will have to leave here”.
Deportations have always been there, following some procedure that met the requirements of “public safety”. But now they are really arbitrary and unjustified mopping-ups with immediate effect.

H. had left early in the morning without papers.
“There is a farmer who comes at dawn and brings fresh laban (yogurt)”.
The soldiers stopped him while he was walking near his house and took him away.