There's a Deal

10 September 2025 · Orem, Utah

A university campus on a warm midday, the mountains far off, the air already smelling of autumn. About three thousand people had gathered outside for the opening of Charlie Kirk's "American Comeback Tour". He sat under a white tent and went from question to question, and the crowd was full of energy, of the feeling that you could change the world if you only shouted loud enough.

Someone asked him about mass shootings. He answered.

And then, some twenty minutes after he had gone on, a single shot.

The crowd froze, and then broke in every direction. The videos started running on social media before anyone understood what they had seen.

In Athens, Alex was sitting at his old computer, trying to write an email to Tel Aviv University about starting a degree. The words wouldn't come. How do you write about the future when the present is coming apart? The alert popped up in the corner of the screen: "Charlie Kirk shot". He needed a second to understand, and another to believe. That same night they announced that Kirk was dead.

The phone rang. His mother. "Did you see what happened in America? Come home. It's not safe anywhere. Certainly not for Israelis."

But where was safe?

In Tel Aviv, Natalie was editing a special broadcast. The pictures streamed across the screen: ambulances, police cars, people running. She typed headlines and felt that it had happened again. The violence reaches places we thought were safe. Her parents called.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. It's far away. Crazy Americans."

The lie didn't feel right. Nothing was far away any more.

In Gaza, Mehran read about it on his phone, sitting on the floor. Azzam sat beside him.

"It's not just us any more," said Azzam. "Violence has gone global."

"Maybe that's how we'll understand we're all in the same boat," said Mehran, and went to the broken window. Stars glinted between the clouds, distant and quiet. "Maybe it's time to stop shouting and start listening."

Maybe this is the broken collective, he thought. Not of peoples, not of states. Of hearts trying to keep beating, even while the world comes apart.

21 September 2025 · Three cities

On 21 September, Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal recognised a Palestinian state. The next day, at the UN in New York, France and several other countries joined them.

Alex read about it at Apollon, between orders, and felt like someone watching the funeral of a dream he had grown up on, without knowing whether he was one of the mourners or one of the killers.

Mehran watched the names join the list, one after another, like beads on a string. He knew that even if the whole world recognised them, it wouldn't fix the broken window. It wouldn't bring his father back. But maybe, just maybe, it would stop the deaths of other children.

"It means they're starting to see us," said Azzam.

"Seeing isn't feeling," Mehran answered. But for the first time, he didn't say it in despair.

26 September 2025 · New York, Gaza City

When Israel's prime minister went up to the podium, the hall in New York emptied. Rows of delegates stood and walked out, one after another. In the gallery, others stood and applauded him. In the wide shot it looked like a speech to an almost empty hall, to heavy air.

At the same time, in Gaza, the loudspeakers were already in place. The prime minister had ordered them set up so that the hostages, if they could hear, would know they had not been forgotten. "We have not forgotten you, not even for a second." Soldiers had to halt operations to set up heavy systems and guard them. Some of them inside the Strip itself. There were commanders who asked, quietly, what for.

Then the prime minister's office announced that the army had taken over the phones in Gaza, and that the speech was being broadcast on them live.

Mehran was sitting with his phone in his hand when the rumour reached him. He looked at the screen. The screen looked at him. Nothing happened. And still he switched it off and laid it face down on the floor. People in the street said afterwards that they had heard nothing on their phones, not a message, not a voice. But the fear had already got in. Can they see me through the camera? Can they hear even when the phone is lying to one side? The conspiracy theories, which had always bloomed in the Strip, were suddenly watered again.

The voice from the loudspeakers carried from far off, distorted, borne on the wind. Mehran understood every word of the Hebrew, and that was the worst of it. Something in it reminded him of what his father used to tell about his great-grandfather, about Jaffa in 1948, about days when loudspeakers carried not songs, but orders.

September 2025 · Tel Aviv

Natalie already knew that everyone around her saw her as the problem. But only when she sat in front of the medical board's psychiatrist did she get an official name for it. Post-trauma. He said it as if he were throwing out a word that explained almost two years of restlessness. She almost laughed. How could one word hold all the outbursts, the days when even a stranger's smile in the street set her on fire?

He explained hypervigilance to her. A nervous system stuck on "emergency". How every sound, every movement, every wrong look became a siren in her body. How the anger wasn't really at the people in the street, but at a world that stayed threatening after the danger had passed.

She came out with an official word on her shoulders. PTSD. It didn't solve the fear. It didn't stop the anger. But for the first time she understood that it wasn't her against the world. It was her against shadows still fighting her from the inside.

On 29 September, at the White House, Trump stood beside the prime minister and presented a plan to end the war. Twenty points. He spoke as if the parties had already agreed, like someone who had decided for them. Joy and tension mixed in everyone involved.

8 October 2025 · Sofia, Athens, Gaza City

On the evening of 8 October, each in a different city but as if in the same room, they sat in front of their small screens. Alex in Athens, Mehran in Gaza, both watching the same broadcast: the Tel Aviv basketball derby. The first ever in the EuroLeague. And it was played in Sofia, because the EuroLeague doesn't hold games in Israel in wartime.

Hapoel lost, 90–103. Again. And this time it hurt less, and precisely because it hurt less, it was worse.

Alex turned off the screen, but not his thoughts. There was an anger in him at Ofer Yannai, the club's owner, that he didn't quite know where to put. In Alex's eyes, from the distance of a screen in Athens, Yannai was everything the red stand wasn't: a money man, religious, from the right of the map. He didn't know him, and had no idea what really went on in his head. That didn't stop him being angry.

He thought of Yannai wanting to move Hapoel, even temporarily, to Yad Eliyahu, Maccabi's home. Of a photo someone had sent to the stand's group chat, in which Yannai seemed to him to be embracing Maccabi's chairman. Of the hostage T-shirts he had seen him wear, which in Alex's head looked like solidarity for the cameras, not from the heart. Maybe that wasn't fair. That night he was in no state to be fair. And of the fact that even some of the ultras had stopped coming.

"How did this happen to us," he muttered. "How did my Hapoel become a political game."

Mehran, on the other side of the sea, held his head in both hands. "The same badge, the same team, and so far away," he said in Arabic, quietly. He didn't understand why he still watched. Maybe because it reminded him of the time when things were simple. When he and Alex talked only about football, about a beautiful move, about a blind referee, before everything became a moral test.

The night was dense. They couldn't sleep. In Alex's window glittered the lights of a small pub down the street. In Mehran's, only the darkness of the Strip.

9 October 2025, 2:17 · Night

And then a message.

"There's a deal."

At first it sounded like another rumour, like all the times before. But WhatsApp woke up, the websites shook, and the headline appeared: Trump announces that Israel and Hamas have agreed on the first phase. A ceasefire. The living hostages, twenty of them, within days. The dead, later. Around two thousand Palestinian prisoners. A withdrawal to an agreed line.

Alex didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Trump. The man he had learned to despise, giving the Middle East its breath back.

Mehran read the same headline in Arabic, on another screen, at exactly the same moment. They wrote to each other almost at once.

"Did you see?"

"I saw. Do you believe it?"

"No. But maybe it's time to. After all, today Hapoel played Maccabi in the EuroLeague. Anything's possible."

In a normal world they would have met the next morning for coffee and argued about a foul in the wrong minute. But their world wasn't normal. They shared the same tiredness, the same guilt of those who live far from the pain and carry it on their shoulders.

"If this is really happening," Alex wrote, "I'm flying home."

"If this is really happening," Mehran answered, "I'm going south to see fields. And then, one day, Jaffa. My great-grandfather was from there. I've only seen it in pictures."

Alex read the word twice. Jaffa. That was where his flat was, two rooms that smelled of salt. Maybe two alleys from Mehran's great-grandfather's house. Maybe the same alley. He didn't write it. Not yet.

They knew they wouldn't meet any time soon. In that moment it didn't matter. They were in the same breath, joined by a thin, strange thread, like a string stretched between two tired worlds.

That night, on the desk in Tel Aviv, Natalie typed the headline: "There's a deal". She waited for her hands to shake. They didn't. This time it didn't frighten her.

10 October 2025 · A different light

In the night the government approved it. At noon the ceasefire came into force.

Alex opened the window. A smell of the sea. He wanted to cry and didn't know why. Maybe because he saw his father in his mind's eye. Not the Vitaly of Florentin and Putin, but another father, the one he had always wanted, telling him: "Peace isn't just a ceasefire, Alex. It's deciding to go on living."

On the table, beside the computer with the email still unsent, lay Niko's page, folded down to the size of a stamp. He opened it and read the line again: "The only way to defeat your enemy is to make him your friend." For the first time it didn't sound like something an old man had said on a pavement.

Mehran wrote to Fatma: "Mum, there's a deal. Maybe you can rest." She answered with a single heart. No words. A few streets away, children began coming out of the houses for the first time in weeks. They weren't sure what was allowed. But they heard their parents whispering about food that would come, about doctors who would get in, and they felt the relief in the air.

That same morning, in Oslo, the Nobel Peace Prize was announced. It went to someone else.

"Didn't get it," wrote Alex.

"Maybe next year," Mehran answered.

"If this holds till next year, I don't know any more what matters more."

Natalie, at the end of her shift, opened the Math Gaza channel again. She wrote one comment, and moved her finger towards delete.

And didn't.

They didn't know if it would hold. They didn't know if the next phases would happen, if the hostages would all come home, if anyone even wanted peace or only a headline. But that night, in three cities, they believed. That maybe, just maybe, the morning would be different.

In three days, if it all held, twenty would come home. Alex looked at the open email and at the plane ticket he hadn't bought yet. Mehran looked at the road south. Natalie looked at the comment she hadn't deleted, and waited to see if anyone would answer.

The morning hadn't come yet.