Quietly, a hospital in the southern Gaza Strip became a site of burning fear and broken bodies. Walls shattered, voices stilled, and the lives of healers and reporters cut short in an instant. A second strike followed when rescuers, journalists, and others gathered to tend the wounded, turning a moment of urgency into a deeper wound for a people already carrying so much. The authorities say they will review what happened, but the aftermath speaks for itself: lives lost, families grieving, and a truth-teller’s work interrupted. The toll among journalists who sought to bear witness—more than a hundred, and counting— reminds us that those who carry light into darkness are among the most vulnerable in war’s cold calculus.

Mother Earth, we hear the echo of your sighs in every shattered corridor and in the sirens that never quite quiet the soil’s ache. The harm done here is not only to bodies but to the soil beneath: water turned to worry, air thick with smoke, a landscape of scars. When a hospital becomes a battlefield, we are witnessing a desecration of sanctuary—an environmental and ethical desecration that spills over into migrations, hunger, and a future denied to children who deserve to grow in quiet, healing air. The violence is louder than the explosion, but the consequence is a long, quiet poisoning of the land that sustains all life.

This moment also forces us to name the deeper roots of such misery. Humanity’s colonial sins—centuries of conquest, dispossession, and the redrawing of maps to favor rulers and traders—have stitched oppression into the fabric of our world. Lands are carved, resources extracted, and people displaced so that empires might drink more deeply from the well of power. In a system built on domination, the bodies of the vulnerable become expendable, and even compassion wears the uniform of a cost center. The toxic capitalism that prizes profit over people—where weapons are manufactured, marketed, and sold while healthcare and truth-telling are starved of resources—feeds these cycles of harm. It is a system that treats the Earth as a commodity to be mined, packaged, and sold, not as a living kin with whom we must live in reciprocity.

Let us not forget that justice and healing are possible only when we uproot these harms at their source. We must demand protection for hospitals, clinics, and journalists as sacred spaces of care and truth; insist on accountability for those who weaponize fear; and reimagine economies that fund peace, not destruction. We must invest in restorative futures—renewable energy that frees communities from the grip of conflict coal and fossil-fueled ambitions; food sovereignty and sustainable water systems; and legal frameworks that honor international humanitarian law and the sanctity of life over geopolitical brinkmanship. Let the oppression of colonization give way to the restoration of dignity; let the profit motive yield to the nourishment of people and the health of the planet.

May we turn from the path that hollowly profits from the fire of war and walk, instead, toward a common garden of resilience. May we tend the earth with as much care as we once poured into borders and bullets. May the truth carried by journalists become a beacon that helps heal the wounded soil as surely as it informs the living. And may healing flow from the roots of solidarity—across borders, across faiths, across species—until the wounds of today teach us how to grow tomorrow.