Diary Entry

They speak of international law. I have slept in the trenches and the flophouses, and I know this: law is a set of blueprints drawn up in a warm room, far from the place where the bricks fall. The report says ninety-one. Ninety-one healthcare workers. A number. But I think of the weight of a stretcher in the hands, the specific burn in the shoulders as you run low, the smell of antiseptic and dust, the vibration of an ambulance floor under your boots. This is the body’s work. To target that work is not an escalation of war; it is a revelation of its true product.

From the ministry’s desk, it is a statistic showing disregard. From the floor of the ambulance, it is a design. They call it a ‘quadruple tap’ - a term that belongs to a manual, clean and tactical. But translate it: the first strike hits the ambulance. The second hits those who rush from the nearby building to pull us from the wreckage. The third hits the fire crew that comes after. The fourth hits the journalists who arrive to document the scene. This is not chaos. This is a system, a factory process for the demolition of witness. It produces silence as efficiently as a cannery line produces tinned salmon.

Poverty of body, poverty of safety, poverty of truth - they are all the same surplus. The system creates the wounded, then systematically destroys the mechanism for their retrieval. The hospital is not a sanctuary in this arithmetic; it is a storage depot for the human refuse of the enterprise, and they are now burning the depot. I have seen the design before, in the slums where the sick are left to fester because caring for them is not profitable. This is that same principle, brought to its logical, explosive conclusion. The law is the blueprint. The rubble, and the stillness where the medics once stood, is the finished product.