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Gaza ceasefire and trauma: Let kids return to childhood [1]

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Date: 2025-01

The Palestinian identity and trauma is inherited. As a mental health professional and psychiatrist working with children in Gaza, I am all too aware that the ceasefire will have a special meaning for children, the most vulnerable in Gaza. Despite not understanding the same way adults do, young kids have experienced the same things too. The loss, grief, fear, and displacement. With any ceasefire, the processing of this collective trauma will only just begin as they attempt to go back to their normal lives.

But what does a normal life look like when they’ve lost everything, their neighborhoods, homes, relatives, family members, loved ones and peers? They will search for normalcy, especially to try to go back to education and for the things that children turn to grow up and mature. These things were all taken from them and they are all important aspects for their community and their futures.

When we think of children’s trauma in psychiatry, it is usually an incident of abuse, an event, something that has changed the way the child thinks and perceives the world due to their pain through a single defined, isolated event. But the genocide is not a single incident or traumatic event. It is a generational wound that Palestinians have been feeling in Gaza for years. What has happened over the last 15 months, has been an unmeasurable ongoing trauma. New generations have been born into this horror, some already as orphans or as refugees – an inherited identity for these children because of Israel’s war on Gaza.

What we hope more than anything is that the ceasefire means an end to this process of continuous grief and trauma. That the children can try to return to their childhoods. It may mean an end to violent military experiences, but nothing can take away their pain of losing their caregivers, mothers, fathers, siblings, and peers. Or the experiences of being displaced, freezing through the winters in tents and starving and scavenging for water. These will stay with them, accompanying them through growing up. But with a ceasefire, the consequences of these traumas will start to become more apparent.

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Working in psychiatry and mental health throughout this genocide has not only helped my community, but helped me in ways that I am still beginning to process. Being from Gaza, I am experiencing the same that my patients are living through. This genocide has rewritten the meanings of grief, trauma, loss, and survival – with these frameworks generally having their origins in Western contexts, they lack the nuance and understanding of the Palestinian culture, as well as the profound and violent experiences that Palestinians have been put through in the last 15 months.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gaza-ceasefire-mental-health-trauma-psychiatrist-children-childhood/

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