Every ride is the creation of a small peace
Yuval Roth’s peace work began with grief — and with a simple request for help.
In 1993, Yuval’s brother Udi was abducted and murdered by Hamas militants while returning home from reserve duty in Gaza. The loss could have closed Yuval’s world. Instead, in the years that followed, he joined the Parents Circle – Families Forum, a community of bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families who meet across the deepest lines of pain and refuse to let grief become only a call for revenge.
It was through the Parents Circle that Yuval met Muhammad Kabeh, a Palestinian from Ya’bad near Jenin. Muhammad asked Yuval for a favor: could he help drive his brother, a cancer patient, from the checkpoint crossing to Rambam Hospital in Haifa? Yuval agreed. Soon, more Palestinian families were asking for the same kind of help. Medical treatment might be covered, but the journey from checkpoint to hospital was often expensive, frightening, and logistically impossible.
Yuval began calling friends. One ride became many. Many rides became Road to Recovery.
Today, Road to Recovery is a network of Israeli volunteer drivers who bring Palestinian patients from checkpoints to hospitals in Israel for treatments they cannot access at home. The work is practical, urgent, and often lifesaving: a child going to surgery, a parent receiving cancer care, a family navigating permits, crossings, fear, and exhaustion. But the road itself also matters. In the car and in the hospital waiting room, Israelis and Palestinians who might otherwise never meet sit together, speak together, and discover one another beyond the roles assigned by the conflict.
Yuval has described these rides as a way of holding on to hope: when Israelis help Palestinians heal, they also heal something in themselves. His work does not pretend that a car ride can solve occupation, violence, blockade, or war. It does something humbler and more immediate. It answers suffering with presence. It turns a stranger into a neighbor. It creates, for a few hours, a small peace.
For B8 of Hope, Yuval’s story reflects the power of grassroots peacebuilding at its most concrete. Road to Recovery shows that hope is sometimes built before dawn, at a checkpoint, by people who choose to drive toward the other side’s pain instead of away from it.