On: US-Iran ceasefire negociations underway in Switzerland

I must tell you, the news from Switzerland has reached us here in Braintree with the same unsettling quiet that follows a storm that has not yet broken. The men speak of ceasefires and negotiations as though they were chess pieces on a board, but I wonder if they have considered the cost of each move to the families who will still be counting bread rations when the ink is dry. Jared Kushner and this envoy Witkoff - what do they know of the price of flour in Beirut? I have seen the ledger for this month’s purchases, and the cost of a single sack has risen by half since spring. That is not a statistic; it is a child going to bed with an empty belly.

You have not mentioned the Lebanese mothers who will send their sons to the border again once the cameras leave, nor the Iranian families who will bury their fathers in unmarked graves if the truce holds only long enough to bury them. The diplomats will return to their fine hotels and speak of stability, but stability does not feed a widow who has lost her husband to a drone strike and now tends the olive trees alone. I see it in the way the women at the market clutch their baskets tighter when the price of lentils climbs another piaster.

If this continues, the ceasefire will be measured not in ceasefires signed, but in children who grow up knowing only the sound of artillery in the distance. The men in Switzerland may forget, but the mothers will remember every negotiation when they wake to another day of rationing.