Right: Feras carrying a child past an Israeli soldier in Nablus.

The first Palestinian Intifada garnered world attention and widespread sympathy for its "children of the stones," young resisters facing off against Israeli tanks, tear gas, and steel-coated rubber bullets--all with little more than a homemade slingshot.

Feras and his son.

To the outside world, there are as yet no equally enduring symbols of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which erupted after seven years of settlement expansion and continued humiliation under the guise of the Oslo "peace process."

In Nablus, I found that symbol. Though he would shy away from the distinction, Feras, a soft-spoken young man from Nablus, could easily be the poster child of the current Intifada.

He is of course no child. In his teens, Feras had already become a volunteer medic, tending to mortal gunshot and shrapnel wounds in the back of a sparely fitted "ambulance."

Feras driving an ambulance.

The sparsely-fitted ambulance.

For his service, he became a political prisoner at the age of 21, seized from his family and imprisoned for 18 months. His crime? Aiding a fellow Palestinian wounded during one of several bloody Israeli assaults on Nablus.

This was a particularly laughable charge to Feras, who detailed for me the dozens of interrogations he endured in captivity. The interrogations began soon after he was seized by Israel's occupation forces, and mere days after the photo at the top of this page, of Feras evacuating a child, hit the local papers. If this was a crime, who would answer for the fact that Feras had been shot by an Israeli soldier while doing his job?

Feras (left) helps carry an injured protestor to his waiting ambulance.

Feras is helped up after being injured while in the line of duty.

Just as before the military court that stole a year and a half of his life, Feras continues to have no recourse with his occupiers or in the vacuous talk of peace broadcasting from Western capitals. No recourse save for the courage and determination -- the bold humanity -- of this Intifada's hobbled generation.

Deprived of opportunity (for his city is surrounded by the cold steel of tanks and checkpoints), deprived of innocence (for he has seen too much of modern weaponry's devastation), he continues to bring bread to the needy, to aid the wounded, and to tenderly shower joy on his one-year old son.

Those of us who have been spared the trauma of this life under occupation may never fully grasp the strength and hope Feras commands. But in his story -- in the story of his generation -- lies the only true hope for peace in this battered land. Peace begins with people like Feras, not with pieces of paper, press conferences, or photo-ops.

Meet Feras.

React: samer@helpupa.com