Mariam is a gardener. In a place where life is taken too easily, Mariam chooses to plant.
She was 65 years old, a grandmother of nine, and the last surviving member of her women's farming cooperative. Her hands were cracked from decades of tending earth, but her back remained straight, her fingers strong. Long before the war, Mariam had believed in soil as medicine, not just for the body, but for the soul. “If I can grow something,” she used to say, “then I am still alive.”
In Gaza, where bombs fall more often than rain, that belief became an act of rebellion.