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.
