“Happy?… I’m afraid to be happy,” answered a Palestinian woman from Gaza when a journalist asked her how she felt after the announcement of the ceasefire.

She did not say she was “at peace,” nor did she say she was “safe”… she said she was afraid.

A short sentence, but it encapsulates the tragedy of a people who have learned to fear even hope.

The woman from Gaza does not fear joy because she is unfamiliar with it, but because she knows very well that joy in Gaza lasts no longer than a truce.

Every silence there is feared as a prelude to a new explosion, and every dawn breaks like a vague promise of survival for another day.

This is the legacy of long months of bombing and destruction: a fear not extinguished by an international statement, nor dispelled by an optimistic headline in the news.

At the same time, news from politicians’ palaces arouses both astonishment and ridicule.

Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, “for his role in mediating to stop the massacre.”

Yes, in the very conflict that claimed thousands of lives, destroyed hospitals, and left a generation of children who know nothing but the sounds of explosions.

It is an absurd scene to reward someone who was a partner in igniting the war with a prize given on the pretext that he was the one who put it out.

It’s like awarding a medical prize to the one who stopped a bleeding he himself caused, deliberately and with premeditation.

“Afraid to be happy”… a phrase that sums up what the term “ceasefire” does not say.

Death may calm, but fear remains awake, like a wound that does not heal.

While politicians race to share glory, the real question is forgotten:

What glory is this, over the rubble of houses, over the bodies of innocents, over the pain of mothers?

Perhaps the real prize is for Gaza’s children to live without fear of joy,

For a mother to smile without fearing that her smile will be followed by an air raid siren,

For peace to become a daily habit, not a temporary announcement.

Those who truly deserve the Nobel are those who have not left the fields of pain.

The mothers who dig through the rubble with their own hands searching for their children,

The doctors who performed surgeries by phone light,

The journalists who broadcast the truth while bombs fell over their heads.

They do not have fancy offices or media advisers,

But they have something higher: faith in life amid death.

Yet their voices are not heard in nomination committees, nor recorded in conference minutes,

For the Nobel Prize is awarded where the noise is loudest, not where the pain is truest.

The world applauds the “truce” and forgets that beneath it lie the bodies of victims, and justice itself.

They exchange congratulations, sign statements.

But Gaza remains an open-air grave.

And in the heart of this scene, a Palestinian woman says with a trembling voice:

“I am afraid to be happy.”

Perhaps this is the phrase that deserves to be engraved on this year’s Nobel medal, and the years to come.

Because on the stage of politics, scenes of peace are performed on stage,

While the real pain is lived behind the curtain, among the rubble,

Where fear of joy is the last thing left of life.