Right Livelihood Laureates from Israel and Palestine have welcomed the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas while calling for caution and close monitoring of its implementation.
Gazan human rights defender and 2013 Laureate Raji Sourani told Right Livelihood he was hoping that the agreement would “bring an end to the live-streamed genocide.”
“Nothing sure yet,” he cautioned.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which received the Right Livelihood Award in 2010, welcomed the agreement in a statement, calling it “an essential first step toward saving lives and putting an end to the violence.”
“After months of darkness and suffering, this moment offers the first glimmers of hope,” said Guy Shalev, PHRI’s Executive Director. “Yet, the relief is tempered with profound grief for the lives lost during the eight months when an identical agreement languished on the government table—a stark reminder of its blatant disregard for human life.”
He said PHRI will closely monitor the implementation of the deal, calling to “sustain public pressure on the Israeli government, which persistently chooses death over life, to ensure the release of all hostages, both Israeli and foreign.”
Shalev also warned that the deal should not “become just another brief pause in the cycle of violence” in Gaza but the start of providing essential aid, including medical infrastructure, to Gazans and rebuilding the devastated area.
“Any rebuilding effort that does not fully uphold the right of Palestinians to live with dignity and freedom, both individually and collectively, will only perpetuate their oppression, leading to further bloodshed and suffering,” he said.
Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro from the West Bank, who received the Right Livelihood Award in 2024, emphasised that a permanent ceasefire is only the first step in ensuring Palestinians’ safety and dignity.
“This is the beginning of giving Palestinians back their full rights and treating them as humans who deserve equality, justice and freedom,” he told Right Livelihood. “I hope that the ceasefire will be in the West Bank as well… and that we will bring enough pressure on the Israeli government to stop Israeli settler violence and terror, land confiscation and house demolition.”
However, Amro worried that Israeli soldiers and settlers would continue to “do whatever they want in the West Bank,” despite the ceasefire deal. With this in mind, he called for the international community to maintain its support for Palestine as a whole.
“Keep the solidarity, keep the non-violent resistance, keep the campaigns, make the occupation more exposed, make the occupation accountable,” he said. “We should not stop. We should continue. We should be more creative. We should be proactive and make the occupation costly.”
The Italian humanitarian aid organisation EMERGENCY, which received the Right Livelihood Award in 2015, has worked in Gaza since August 2024. They warned that the humanitarian situation continues to worsen daily. The organisation said that the ceasefire was the “first step to silence the guns,” but the effects of the war will linger for many years to come.
“The withdrawal of the military will not mean, in fact, the end of suffering,” EMERGENCY said in a statement. “The social and human tragedy of war will continue, and the reconstruction of a semi-normality will be a long and difficult path.”
The UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, a 2012 Laureate, has been working to stop British arms sales to Israel. They said the ceasefire must also mean stopping the flow of weapons.
“We need to keep demanding a full two-way arms embargo,” the organisation said in a statement. “A genuine, long-lasting peace can only be achieved when we stop the flow of arms sales.”
