By Professor Theo Gavrielides, Founder and Director, Restorative Justice for All International Institute (RJ4All) and RJ4All Europe.
2 March 2026
Contact:
Email: t.gavrielides@rj4all.org
Tel (UK): +44 (0)7732 569000
Tel (Cyprus): +357 9936 3732
The human cost we are choosing not to see
I am not writing this to argue who is right and who is wrong. What I want to talk about is what this war is costing us. In human lives. In children. In the future of peace, that may never arrive.
Within 48 hours of war breaking out on 28 February 2026, at least 150 people were killed in a single airstrike on a primary school in Minab, Southern Iran. Many were children. In Israel, families shelter underground as sirens have become the backdrop of daily life. In Gaza, a fragile recovery from famine has collapsed overnight as border crossings were sealed and aid halted. In Lebanon, 31 people have been killed as the conflict spreads. Two missiles fired from Iran travelled in the direction of Cyprus, where RJ4All Europe is based, reportedly towards UK military installations.
These are not collateral facts. They are the point.
Equality and fairness demand we ask a question not being asked loudly enough: why do the people least responsible for this conflict bear the greatest share of its consequences? Why are children in Iran, civilians in Israel, families in Gaza, Lebanon, and other areas paying with their lives for decisions made by governments acting in their own interests? Why does the mother who sent her child to school in Minab have no voice in the conversation that took that child from her? This is not justice by any definition. It is the opposite.
What happens when no one listens
I have spent my life studying and practising restorative justice in peace-building, and I have made a conscious decision to dedicate the next ten years of my work to evidence-based alternatives to conflict. I have come to understand that violent conflict is almost never about what it claims to be about. The most persistent driver is power abuse: who controls resources, territory, influence, and narrative. Beneath every war lies a story of grievances never properly heard, wounds never genuinely addressed, and fears exploited rather than resolved.
What we are watching in the Middle East is the consequence of dialogue replaced by threats, negotiation replaced by sanction, and human relationships replaced by geopolitical positioning. The people of this region have lived with the consequences of decisions made in their name but rarely with their meaningful participation. And now, once again, they are being told that the solution to the violence they have already endured is more violence.
After both World Wars, humanity came together and said: never again. We signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We built the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and regional human rights bodies. Those institutions are now struggling; their voices weakened against the interests of the powerful. And since September 2001, we have watched a steady erosion of civil liberties in the name of security, sold to us as temporary but proven to be foundational.
We have allowed a “them and us” narrative to corrupt something entirely natural to us as human beings: our urge to co-exist. Reducing complex peoples and cultures to threats, enemies, and pawns is not strength. It is the abandonment of our shared humanity. And wars conducted in the name of justice whilst killing the very people they claim to protect lead not to peace, but to the next war.
What restorative justice asks of us
I come from a family of refugees who fled Cyprus in 1974 following the Turkish invasion. I know, through my own family’s history, what war does to generations. The death, the displacement, the trauma that echoes through decades and shapes children who were not even born when the original wound was made.
I have also seen, with my own eyes, what community-led peace-building can achieve: women, young people, former combatants, and survivors coming together in restorative justice circles to build what no military operation has ever produced, genuine understanding across a line of enmity.
Restorative justice is not a new idea. It is one of humanity’s oldest approaches to conflict, rooted in the understanding that harm must be addressed rather than suppressed, and that those most affected must have a central voice in how it is resolved. Crucially, it is deeply embedded in Middle Eastern cultures and the Islamic legal tradition, where pardon and reconciliation have long been fundamental principles. This is not a Western import. It is a living tradition within the very communities now engulfed by this war.
Restorative justice does not ask us to ignore wrongdoing, or pretend harm did not occur. It asks something harder: that we look at one another as human beings, share power rather than hoard it, and measure justice not by how completely we have destroyed an adversary, but by how fully we have addressed the needs of those who have been harmed.
RJ4All’s work in the region
This statement is not written from a distance. RJ4All has been doing the patient, unglamorous work of building restorative justice capacity across the Middle East and neighbouring regions for years, because peace is built long before the bombs fall, and must be rebuilt long after they stop.
In January 2025, I stood before an international conference in Bahrain, organised with the Office of Public Prosecution, the Ministry of Interior, Naif Arab University for Security Sciences, and UNODC. I said then that my hope was renewed by initiatives bringing civilisations together under the auspices of restorative justice, and that the Middle East and the West have much to learn from each other. That hope has not left me, even now. Perhaps, especially now.
Through our ENHANCE project in Jordan and Egypt, RJ4All has been working with NGOs and educators to tackle gender inequality, build communities less prone to division, and ensure that girls and young women have a genuine stake in the future of their societies. Through the Restoring Respect in Sports project in Turkey and across Europe, we have been confronting hate, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia within sporting communities.
These projects share a single conviction: that fairness, equality, dignity, and inclusion are not ideals to be deferred until after the conflict ends. They are the conditions that prevent conflict from beginning.
An Appeal
I am calling on all parties to this conflict, and on the international community, to stop and look at what is actually happening to real people. Not to strategic assets or missile programmes, but to the child who did not come home from school in Minab. To the family rationing food in Gaza. To the person in a shelter in Tel Aviv wondering when their life will resume.
Group interests, the absence of mutual understanding, and the collapse of genuine dialogue have brought us to this point. We must not allow weapons to remain the only language available to us. The knowledge of how to do better exists, in restorative justice practice, in community-led peacebuilding, in the patient and profoundly human work of sitting across from someone you fear and choosing to understand rather than to destroy.
That work will not make tomorrow’s headlines. But it is the only work that has ever, in human history, actually made peace.
