Peace is not a perfume sprayed over violence

Dear Editor,

I recently watched the haunting docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab.  The film takes place in January 2024 inside a Palestinian Red Crescent emergency call center and uses recordings of Hind’s actual voice as the five-year-old in Gaza pleads for help from a car in which she is surrounded by her dead relatives.  

Hind's body was later found in the car, reportedly riddled with 335 bullets, believed to have been fired by Israeli forces.  The ambulance sent to rescue her was destroyed, killing both paramedics.

Through Hind's conversations with dispatchers, we learn that the name of her school was "The Happy Child," and in preschool she was in "The Butterfly Class."  Her mother recalls that Hind loved playing in the sand and ocean, and we see home video of her joyfully doing so.

Strikingly, during pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, activists occupied Hamilton Hall, renaming it "Hind's Hall" in her honor.

President Trump's inaugural meeting of his "Board of Peace" focused on Gaza.  At the meeting, Trump emphasized that the parents who received the remains of the last Israeli hostage "wanted that dead body as much as if he were alive... There was great sadness, but there was great joy too."

But in June 2024 the organization Save the Children estimated that over 20,000 Gazan children were missing — lost to their families, detained, or buried beneath the rubble or in unmarked mass graves.

Trump also asserted that "the war in Gaza is over.... What we're doing is very simple: Peace."

Yet the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem contends that since the "ceasefire" started on October 10, 2025 the Israeli army has killed at least 609 people in Gaza, including at least 100 children. 

Kaouther Ben Hania is the director of The Voice of Hind Rajab.  At the Cinema for Peace gala in Berlin, Germany on February 16, Ben Hania noted that Hind's killing is not an exception, and she refused an award insisting that  "peace is not a perfume sprayed over violence so power can feel refined, and can feel comfortable... If we speak about peace, we must speak about justice.  Justice means accountability."

As world leaders invoke peace in name, Hind’s story demands that we ask what peace without justice truly means.

Ben Hania's words remind us that peace without accountability is not reconciliation—it is denial.

Terry Hansen

Grafton, WI