In addition to killing, maiming, and forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has wrought tremendous psychological damage upon kids in the embattled strip, as detailed by a Save the Children report published Tuesday.
The charity’s report – entitled Trapped and Scarred: The Compounding Mental Harm Inflicted on Palestinian Children in Gaza – examines how “five months of violence, displacement, starvation, and disease on top of nearly 17 years of a blockade have caused relentless mental harm to children in Gaza.”
Jason Lee, Save the Children’s country director for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement that “it is unacceptable that any child should contend with the horrors that those in Gaza have lived through. While dodging bombs and bullets, fleeing through streets littered with debris and corpses, being forced to sleep in the open air, and going without the basic food and clean water they need to survive, children in Gaza are going through a period of mass-scale shock and grief.”
“Children in Gaza were already living with unimaginable distress following 16 years of blockade and successive escalations in violence,” Lee added. “This war and the physical and mental scars it is leaving on children is further eroding their resilience.”
‼️ Trapped and scarred: Save the Children's latest report highlights that children in #Gaza have endured 'complete psychological destruction' during five months of war. pic.twitter.com/qq3bZKwuju
— Save the Children Europe (@SaveChildrenEU) March 12, 2024
One mother of four children aged 7-14 told Save the Children that she “wouldn’t even say that their mental health has deteriorated – it’s been obliterated. Complete psychological destruction.”
Another Gaza mother said: “Our children have already lived through different wars. They already lacked resilience and now it’s very difficult to cope. The children are scared, angry, and can’t stop crying. Even many adults do the same. This is too much for adults to cope with, let alone children.”
Waseem, a father, said that “children here have seen everything. They’ve seen the bombs, the deaths, the bodies – we can’t pretend to them anymore. Now they understand and have seen everything. Now, my son can even tell what types of explosives are falling – he can hear the difference.”
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, Gaza is “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child,” as more than 13,000 Palestinian minors have been killed, and many thousands more wounded, by Israeli attacks and hundreds of thousands of children are among the approximately 2 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people who have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s bombardment and invasion.
Palestinian youth who survive Israel’s bombs and bullets face rampant disease and hunger that’s now killing not only infants and children but also teens and elderly adults as Israeli soldiers and civilians alike continue to block lifesaving aid from entering Gaza. U.N. experts say Israel’s forced starvation of Gazans is a genocidal act of the kind Israel was ordered to prevent in the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) January 26 preliminary ruling in response to South African-led allegations of Israeli genocide.
Many surviving Palestinian children have lost one or both parents. Some have lost entire families. A new acronym has even been coined to describe some of these orphans: WCNSF, or “wounded child, no surviving family.”
Around 1,000 of those wounds required the amputation of one or more of a child’s limbs. Due to a lack of medication caused by Israel’s siege, many little arms and legs have been sawed off without anesthesia. Screams and prayers fill the air of makeshift operating rooms, as Israel’s relentless onslaught has obliterated Gaza’s hospitals, clinics, and healthcare infrastructure.
Sometimes, even survivor stories have tragic endings, as in the case of Dunia Abu Mohsen, a 12-year-old who first lost one of her legs, her parents, and two siblings in an Israeli airstrike, and then her life when an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank fired a shell at the hospital in which she was recovering. Or 2-year-old Kareem Abu Zaid, who survived three different Israeli airstrikes that killed close relatives including his mother and sister before he was killed in a fourth IDF strike.
The tragic last interview of Dunia Abu Mohsin.
Israel has killed the only surviving member of this Palestinian family.
Dunia Abu Mohsin lost her parents, brother, and sister in Israeli bombing last week. Due to which she had to have her leg amputated.
Earlier this week, Dunia… pic.twitter.com/gPm2JOT5fu
— Khalissee (@Kahlissee) December 21, 2023
Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. This originally appeared at CommonDreams and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Peace on Earth is the only answer to WAR. Get the news?…
Every child in Gaza has experienced more trauma than any American soldier ever did.
Our Zionists in Washington DC are as evil as the Zionists in Tel Aviv.
Biden is demented, but he does know enough about the genocide massacres in Gaza, he knows all about the hell tortured children go through, he knows about the war crimes of individual IDF scum and the torture and humiliation inside and out of prison, he is a mass killer.
He deserves amputation without anesthetics, maybe he would get the message of the crimes in Gaza.
Mr. Biden has grandchildren who are living nice, carefree lives, free of the oppression of an occupying force, free of seeing their family killed. For 17 years, Israelis have lived their carefree lives, kind of knowing that Palestinians living in the largest concentration camp ever known do not have the same lives. Perhaps many did not know, like the towns next to the German concentration camps, the killing camps, what went on the other side of the barbed wire, the walls, that alleged not to have known. Polls in Israel indicate 68% of the Israeli population are all in on the killing by the IDF. 68%! A CNN reported encountered Israeli protesters attempting to block trucks bring humanitarian aid, food, flour. One of the Israeli women interviews flat out said that there should be no flour for the starving Palestinian children! No hint of consideration by her or another Israeli woman accompanying her. “Chosen people”, indeed.
Would any, I mean any, Western nation watch like they do if the situation were the reverse in some alternative Universe where this story was about Jewish children, babies and mothers.
Perhaps. If in that possible Universe the Nazis won. Otherwise there is no other way in which to explain the apathy and indifference, at best that is, as racism in it’s ugliest form possible. I feel completely estranged from what I thought was part of a very fallible but in essence still just or striving toward something like that political world in which people would differ on all sorts of things, but not on the proposition that mass killings of children, babies was something excusable, let alone something you should support and aid. I have been forever cured of that illusion.
It’s the objective of the Israeli government to destroy the next generations of Palestinians. The majority of death and maiming is among children and women,
Note the silence from Jake and Tim Burns on this thread.
Too many words for simple things. Destroying children was, is and continues to be a key objective. We tend to dismiss when people say hortible things — our mind does not accept unthinkable, This makes us human. Yet, scores of Israeli officials over number of years — especially recently said so much. Time to believe what people say.
Palestian chikdren are sacrificial lambs so we can open our eyes and see. Time to take that red pill. And reject seductive bromides dispensed by Matrix to keep us all blind. These sacrificed lambs are giving us sight. It helps us recognize humans from demons in human clothes. Their blood gave us a precious gift. Use it wisely.