The scenes of joy coming out of Gaza after the announcement of a ceasefire are not a moment of victory, but a desperate breath after hell. It is joy tinged with pain: people are celebrating the halt to killing, not the achievement of justice; they celebrate returning to their areas, yet the catastrophe of losing everything confronts them with the hard question of what comes next.

The joy is deserved, because every moment without bombardment is a gain. But it is a joy mixed with collective shame toward a world that watched the massacre for two years and did not act, yet was complicit, and with bitterness toward all who invested Gaza’s blood as fuel for their political rhetoric.

We do not honor the blood and suffering of Gaza’s people by treating the lives of those taken by Israel’s machinery of terror—and the humiliation, poverty, and displacement inflicted over the past two years—as a page we can now turn. This will not be settled by continuing to rail against Netanyahu and a craven West while turning away from ourselves.

Those outside Gaza, analysts, activists, and permanent “resistance” theorists, practiced intimidation that imposed a kind of silence for fear of being branded traitors. They incited the war’s continuation in the name of dignity, and demonized anyone calling for an end to it as “defeatist” or “normalizer.” Experience has shown, however, that this discourse was not resistance; it was a cover for catastrophe.

No national or liberation project can be built on rubble or atop the ruins of cities. A besieged society cannot be turned into a perpetual testing ground for the slogans of outsiders.

Are we meant to close the chapter without any reckoning? I am not speaking only of global betrayal; more dangerously, I am speaking of the fragmentation within our own societies.

Is there a reassessment of our rhetoric? Of our media? Of the activists among us? Is there a review of slogans like “Hallil ya Duwairi” and the “we can liberate it all” crowd, of “fighting from zero distance,” of “beyond Haifa,” and of the calls from preachers and commentators who filled the airwaves urging the fight’s continuation as if victory were just a hair’s breadth away?

What do we do with the peddlers of delusion who cost us blood and precious lives, and with the purveyors of fake victories?

Sound political analysis today must begin with admitting that the war has ended in a comprehensive moral and human defeat, and that those who continue to deny this are complicit in perpetuating the spiral of destruction.

This is not merely a slip-up; it is about consequences: the discourses that promoted “continuation” normalized human loss as an acceptable price to preserve a political dream. That reality demands moral and political accountability. We must ask openly: who paid the price for those narratives? Who profited politically from marketing them? Who lost in terms of lives, institutions, and material assets? Was liberation achieved?

Freedom of expression that was used to silence voices calling for life has been turned into a tool of denunciation and confiscation—especially in Lebanon, where the same scene was replayed: incitement to keep fighting on the borders and vilification of every voice warning against a slide into total war.

One cannot ignore that international abandonment and double standards encouraged the rhetoric of fighting to the last breath as the only option, but that truth does not absolve local accountability. The end of fighting has imposed a new reality: the season of reassessment must include a strategic evaluation and an open debate about how political goals are measured, and whether the means used guaranteed humane and legal ends.

Television channels, journalists and analysts must bear critical responsibility before they turn a battlefield event into a “victory” — they should do so only after clear humanitarian and political indicators have been considered. Media institutions must re-evaluate their roles: were they platforms for explaining outcomes or marketplaces for victory symbols? Were loss estimates and the humanitarian impact reported accurately, or was an alternative narrative constructed?

We must refuse to turn war into an emotional commodity sold on analysis shows, and instead demand a civic voice that first accounts for the blood spilled, then for the rhetoric. In the end, one cannot rebuild cities or reclaim the struggle for rights while hearts remain bound to the myth of an illusory victory.

The reckoning must begin now.

From this perspective, accountability is a moral duty for anyone who turned war into a romanticized, remote option, and for anyone who staged fictitious heroics on the ruins of real people. Accountability does not mean vengeance; it means acknowledging that the rhetoric of gratuitous death must be defeated just as the killing machine itself must be defeated.