Letters to the editor - August 2, 2025

In Gaza, even the soil weeps

Alfred Fabri of Attard writes:

Each image emerging from this humanitarian cataclysm, every frame of agony frozen in time defies the silence that history so often imposes on the oppressed. Children with hollow, haunted eyes stare into lenses that carry their pain across oceans. Beneath crushed concrete lie skeletal bodies, where once there was laughter, movement and life.

Palestinian children queue for a portion of hot food distributed by a charity kitchen at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Photo: Eyad Baba / AFP

These are not distant tragedies. They are not unfortunate byproducts of war. They are deliberate acts.

This is not conflict; it is the systematic erasure of a people. Genocide, cloaked in legalese. Starvation, deployed as a strategy. The withholding of food, water and medicine is not collateral damage; it is official policy.

And the world, shamefully, watches. It debates. It delays. While families perish and infants cry out from the depths of hunger, the machinery of international diplomacy grinds forward at a glacial pace.

But the images remain. They sear. They scream. They refuse to be forgotten.

Long after time exhales its final breath, these images will endure. They will haunt the conscience of a world that knew and looked away.

Because truth does not expire. Nor can it be buried beneath indifference. The faces of Gaza’s children are eternal. And their suffering is unforgivable.

The two dioceses

Anthony Saliba of St Paul’s Bay writes:

Malta and Gozo enjoy two separate, distinctive dioceses. Namely, Malta is run by the archbishop of Malta while that of Gozo, a smaller yet always very important one, is run by a bishop.

They both issue canonical declarations and both can preach their own ideologies from the pulpit. Once or twice a year they issue a declaration conjointly. Same theme, same thoughts.

Now we come to the hard part. While our archbishop skims a national topic, which the government is proposing to the detriment of the majority and to the privilege of the few, the Gozo bishop is blunt and explains that the intentions of the government are precisely to advantage the few.

People know all this by following the many online comments in favour of Bishop Anton Teuma. Archbishop Charles Scicluna skirts around the many attempts by the government when proposing new laws and amendments which irk a large number of the population.

The fight against the introduction of socialism by the late, beloved and outspoken Archbishop Michael Gonzi outshines Scicluna’s doctrine to his sheep by a trillion points.