The memories of the past three years in the Middle East and West Asia are beleaguered by horrendous acts violence and brutality. Whether it was Hamas attack on innocent Israeli people at a party in 2023 or the subsequent bloody reprisal by IDF against Palestinians in Gaza, humanity suffered terrible shocks and descended to depths of hell.

Two developments of the recent past in Israel however bring redemption. They reinforce my faith in the democratic institutions in that region. One was when the Israeli Supreme Court condemned actions by IDF and settlers against Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank inhuman and brutal. The second was the report of the Civil Commission which thoroughly investigated the attack by Hamas in October 2023.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the terror immediately and unambiguously, expressed solidarity with the victims, and has since consistently pleaded for the protection of civilian lives and a return to peace and dialogue. When India was struck at Pahalgam this April, Israel was among the first nations in the world to condemn the attack, with no hedging and no delay. Each response arrived with the speed of recognition, the recognition of a country that has learned from its own accumulated grief exactly what this kind of violence is and what it is designed to produce.

There is a question that every country faces in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, one that is harder than it appears: why document? Why assemble the evidence, compile the testimonies, present the dossiers, and show the world the full picture of what was done? India grappled with this after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. The answer we arrived at was that documentation is not merely a legal obligation. It is a moral one. To document is to insist that what happened was real, that the victims were real, that the perpetrators are identifiable, and that the world cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for inaction. India built what remains the most meticulously evidenced account of a terrorist........

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