Children of Gaza and the impact of the latest war on them, and of what came before it.
Anyone who hears about the children of Gaza now tends to have a preconceived idea shaped by what they read in the press, especially the term that has become widespread over recent years and decades: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a concept most people have heard of or read about.
But what is happening in Gaza is far greater than PTSD, and far deeper than that.
PTSD emerged as a medical diagnosis to describe a specific condition: exposure to a single, exceptional traumatic event that posed an immediate threat to an individual’s existence and survival at a particular moment in time. This diagnosis arose, to a large extent, under social pressures related to compensating combatants and war victims.
This is not the case in Gaza today.
There is no single trauma confined to a specific moment in time. Instead, there are repeated, life-threatening traumas occurring daily over the course of two full years. The child’s very existence is threatened every day, at every moment. The child lives in a prolonged state of deprivation unprecedented in the world: deprivation of food, of home, of water, and of normal parental care, either because the parents have been lost, or because they themselves live in a state of fear and helplessness.
The child is deprived of play and of school. These are daily, life-threatening traumas, coupled with total deprivation of everything, for two long years and more.
Two years in the life of a child mean everything.
They do not represent a single moment of trauma that occurs and then ends; they represent an entire developmental stage in a child’s life. And certainly, we are facing something deeper, more enduring, and more destructive than anything encompassed by the widely used term known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Here, the process is broader, more entrenched, and more resistant to treatment, because it concerns the child’s very development. It becomes a structural part of the child’s brain development and psychological growth. It affects how the child regulates emotions, emotions that become dysregulated and chaotic, as well as the nature of their social and human relationships, the quality of their communication, their philosophical outlook, and even their understanding of the meaning of life itself.
Children… my God.
How will they grow up? And what will they become?
Nothing will compensate them. They have lost their innocent childhood, and the loss will continue for what remains of their lives. Something has been broken forever.