On November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by a young right-wing Israeli as he left a large peace rally in Tel Aviv, and he died a short time later in a hospital across the city.
The rally filled Kings of Israel Square. Tens of thousands sang for a peace deal with the Palestinians that Rabin had spent his last years chasing.
The night felt calm. Then came the shots.
Rabin, a former general who had led troops in war, had come to back a settlement that traded land for a measure of safety, and the accord signed at Oslo brought him the Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres even as hard-line voices at home called the bargain a betrayal of the land.
The gunman, Yigal Amir, opposed the handover of territory on religious and nationalist grounds, and he acted alone with a small pistol, stepping close to the prime minister in the parking lot where guards had relaxed their watch at the edge of a crowd that had come to cheer the very peace he meant to stop.
The news spread fast. Strangers wept in the streets, and Israel observed a silence that reached far beyond politics, as leaders across the world sent condolences and paused to mark the loss of a soldier-turned-statesman who had chosen the table over the battlefield in his final act.
A memorial stands where he fell. The songs from that square still play each year, and the question of what peace might have looked like without the bullet remains a wound that has not closed in the decades since.