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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Gaza: Israel’s One Million Child Prison is a Mental Health Crisis</h1>August 20, 2022</div>
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<img src="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Vigil-678x455.png" alt="" title="Vigil" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="418" height="281">
A vigil near the graves of
Palestinian children who were killed in the latest Israeli war on Gaza.
(Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
<p><strong>By <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/omar-aziz" title="Display all articles for Omar Aziz">Omar Aziz</a></strong></p><p>“Inflicting hurt on any child during the course of conflict is deeply disturbing,” <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/08/bachelet-alarmed-number-palestinian-children-killed-latest-escalation-urgeshttps://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/08/bachelet-alarmed-number-palestinian-children-killed-latest-escalation-urges" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>
Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner for human
rights last Thursday, voicing alarm at the number of Palestinian
children killed this month by Israel.</p>
<p>“The killing and maiming of so many children this year is unconscionable,” she continued.</p>
<p>So what does it mean when Israel launches aerial assaults year after
year with world-leading industrialized military technology on a besieged
enclave of mostly children?</p>
<p>“International humanitarian law is clear. Launching an attack which
may be expected to incidentally kill or injure civilians, or damage
civilian objects, in disproportionate manner to the concrete and direct
military advantage anticipated, is prohibited. Such attacks must stop,”
said Bachelet.</p>
<p>According to the <a href="https://pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4213" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics</a>, 47% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population are children, others place the percentage higher at 50%.</p>
<p>And Gaza’s population is notoriously crammed in, especially among the eight refugee camps officially recognized by <a href="https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/gaza-strip" target="_blank" rel="noopener">UNRWA</a>,
which are considered some of the world’s most densely populated places.
Yet each one is still considered a legitimate target by Israeli
warplanes.</p>
<p>With this knowledge, what becomes unmistakably apparent is that each
bomb Israel drops on the besieged enclave, war crime after war crime, is
done so knowingly that children are the likely victims.</p>
<p>Whether it’s children massacred as ‘collateral damage’ in so-called
‘targeted precision-strikes’, or children struck for simply being
Palestinians – just like the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/08/after-initially-blaming-palestinians-israel-admits-to-airstrike-that-killed-5-children-in-gaza/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">five Palestinian children</a>
killed in a missile strike while at their grandfather’s grave in
Al-Falluja Cemetery, east of Jabalya, on August 7th. A crime Israel’s
military first pretended it didn’t commit, a lie Western corporate media
publications willfully <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israels-army-rocket-misfired-palestinian-militants-killed-civilians-88043636" target="_blank" rel="noopener">parroted</a> without hesitation despite Israel’s track record of spreading lies and disinformation.</p>
<p>Or children with no choice whatsoever but to absorb each scarring
episode of Israel’s ground shaking destructive power while imprisoned in
this tiny strip of land.</p>
<p>The figures are no longer shocking, but nightmarish – dystopian. A
situation scarcely believable to those who have not witnessed the
reality firsthand or paid attention to Palestinian testimonies.</p>
<p>Palestinian-American academic <a href="https://twitter.com/YousefMunayyer/status/1556851118809964544?s=20&t=fQLDXS35nvQx3o8IzGT59w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Yousef Munayyer</a> says it is time to stop calling Gaza an ‘open-air prison’, but what it really is: a torture chamber.</p>
<p>Guess what? An engineered environment designed to incubate and
inflict psychological trauma, physical suffering and economic
deprivation has done just that. <em>Quelle surprise</em>.</p>
<p>Today, <a href="https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/fifteen-years-of-blockade-for-children-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noopener">80%</a> of Gaza’s children now report living with depression, grief and fear according to Save the Children.</p>
<p>In its 2014 aggression on Gaza, Israel killed 547 Palestinian
children in seven weeks. In May 2021, it killed 67 children there. And
this month, at least 17 children have been killed in Gaza.</p>
<p>But these are not Gaza’s only child victims.</p>
<p>Right now there are one million children in Gaza who have been
brutalized and traumatized from at least 29 military aggressions since
2003, each with voices to be heard, stories to be told and lives
deserving of so much more than this.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Speaking on Palestine Deep Dive’s <a href="https://youtu.be/aR3Sc53JdLw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">live show</a> last week which focuses on Gaza’s child mental health crisis, 17-year-old writer and musician <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/home/contributors/hind_wihaidi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hind Wihaidi</a> tells viewers:</p>
<blockquote><p>“The past three days when the aggression happened were
really tragic for me. It gave me a lot of flashbacks of those
aggressions that we’ve lived before.</p>
<p>“It got me thinking a lot about where I’m actually living, the prison
that I’m actually in, me knowing that I might die literally any second
while I’m talking to anyone, while I’m sitting, while I’m watching TV,
while I’m thinking about something because this is what happened with
other children.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But while Palestinian children were attempting to adjust back to the
‘normality’ of siege and ongoing immiseration following the
attacks, Israeli military pundits were taking to the airwaves to
congratulate Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid on his “clean” operation.</p>
<p>Speaking to the daily Maariv’s FM radio station on Monday August 9, <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/08/israeli-general-a-harvard-fellow-extols-gaza-onslaught-as-really-clean-and-very-nice/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1659977069" target="_blank" rel="noopener">General Amos Yadlin</a>, former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate and senior Harvard fellow, rejoiced:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It was a successful round. It was really clean, we hit
hard the Hamas military wing [later correcting himself to say he meant
Islamic Jihad], we hardly hit innocents and unaffiliated, there’s not
one Israeli who was hit, I think it’s an exceptional achievement.” (<a href="https://www.maariv.co.il/news/military/Article-937342">Hebrew</a>).</p></blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, Haaretz journalist Amos Harel and Neri Zilber of the Israel Policy Foreign <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/08/israel-lobby-briefing-on-gaza-praises-pinpoint-attacks-and-leaves-out-17-dead-palestinian-children/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">failed to mention</a>
Palestinian civilian deaths in an hour-long podcast assessing the
attacks on August 10th, instead praising Israel’s “pinpoint” strikes.</p>
<p>It was already known by this time that at least 15 Palestinian
children had been killed, illuminating what Palestinians have said for
decades; Palestinian erasure and the dehumanization of Palestinian
children are the grotesque foundations upon which Israel’s apartheid and
colonization flourishes.</p>
<p>Offering a mother’s perspective of raising children in Gaza, Palestinian author and mother of three <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/home/contributors/rana_shubair_/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rana Shubair</a> tells Palestine Deep Dive:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I tried to protect [my children] from seeing images on
TV, but the environment that our children live in is uncensored, meaning
wherever they go, they will see pictures of martyrs.</p>
<p>“In the last aggression [May 2021], one of my daughter’s friends who
was in their school got killed. I don’t think my daughters ever really
got over her because one of them tells me that she always sees her in
her dreams, and it’s very hard for them to just grasp the concept or the
notion of death and all of that. All children here in Gaza, they’re
very heroic, let’s say, because they have grown above their age and have
been forced to absorb things that children in other parts of the world
know nothing about. Ask any child here, they’ll tell you what kind of
plane is hovering above, whether it’s a drone or an F-16. They know all
of this war terminology, but as parents, we try to find, I guess, the
right ways to deal with our children’s trauma.</p></blockquote>
<p>With each aggression and with each month of Israel’s continuous
hermetic siege and its resulting economic deprivation, Gaza children’s
mental health predictably continues to deteriorate.</p>
<p>For instance, in 2018 <a href="https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/fifteen-years-of-blockade-for-children-in-gaza">60% </a>of
children there reported they feel less safe away from their parents,
but just before the recent attacks this figure reached 90%, according to
Save the Children.</p>
<p>In 2018, <a href="https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/fifteen-years-of-blockade-for-children-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noopener">50%</a> of children reported feeling fearful, and <a href="https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/fifteen-years-of-blockade-for-children-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noopener">55%</a> with
feelings of grief and just months before this attack 78% of Gaza’s
children reported feeling fearful and 84% with feelings of grief.</p>
<p>One can only imagine how they feel today.</p>
<p>During Palestine Deep Dive’s show, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csy9fp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei</a>, Director of the <a href="https://www.gcmhp.ps/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gaza Community Mental Health Program</a>,
emphazises the continuous nature of traumatic events there which limit
the applicability of disorders familiar to Western psychiatry, such as
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, making genuine recovery so difficult.</p>
<blockquote><p>“First, the pre-traumatic event is not an easy,
smooth-going life etc. No, we speak of blockade, we speak of occupation,
we speak of more than two thirds of the population in Gaza being
refugees. So we speak about decades. This doesn’t go only [back] to
1967, but it goes also to 1948. Then, not only that, but you live under
blockade, not only that, but within that blockade you are exposed to
large scale operations… and despite that, you hear all the time these
cues, things that remind you of the traumatic events that are happening
around you. You listen to the news, you see how things are on the heat.
You look at the skies, you continuously hear the loud sounds of the
drones and they all bring you the bad memories.</p>
<p>Then, in the aftermath… there isn’t really return to normal life.
It’s again life as usual under occupation, under the drones, under the
blockade etc. The traditional Western notion of post-traumatic stress
disorder, I wouldn’t say it doesn’t apply to a place like Gaza, but I
would say that the situation in Gaza is deeper than that. We cannot
really just describe it as a PTSD in its simple notion. No, it’s far
beyond that.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In 1991, Israel ratified the UN’s convention on the Right of the
Child, which says that all children have the fundamental rights to life,
survival, development, protection from violence and an education that
enables them to fulfill their potential.</p>
<p>Yet, under Israel’s apartheid, it violates this convention with
impunity across Palestine. In Israel itself, Palestinian or Arab schools
often receive almost <a href="https://bdsmovement.net/colonialism-and-apartheid/palestinian-citizens-of-israel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">six times</a> less
funding per child than schools for Jewish students, as they are
ineligible for funding from Zionist institution. They then go on to face
discrimination in job markets and are also subjected to Israel’s <a href="https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771" target="_blank" rel="noopener">65 racist laws</a>.</p>
<p>In the West Bank, Palestinian children are subjected to
discriminatory laws and practices. They are routinely denied the right
to education when forced to wait at checkpoints, their classes can be
disrupted by the Israeli military at any moment.</p>
<p>According to the Defense for Children International, in Palestine each year approximately <a href="https://www.dci-palestine.org/israel_must_release_all_palestinian_child_detainees_amid_covid_19_pandemic" target="_blank" rel="noopener">500 to 700</a>
Palestinian children, some of them as young as 12 years old, are
detained and prosecuted in Israel’s military kangaroo courts. The most
common charge against them is stone throwing.</p>
<p>Israel’s disregard for Palestinian children’s most fundamental
rights, including the very right to life itself, exposes its Israel’s
commitment to achieving a future peace for what it is really is, a
blatant lie.</p>
<p>But not only that, the international community’s overwhelming silence
shows the dehumanization of Palestinian children extends well beyond
the apartheid state of Israel.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of the latest attack, President <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israel-saved-countless-lives-biden-says/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Biden</a> praised Israel for “defending its people” and its military systems “saving countless lives”.</p>
<p>Meanwhile this week, UK Conservative politicians competing to become
the next Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, both seem to back
moving the embassy to Jerusalem.</p>
<p>Instead of sanctions, incitement continues to be the order of the day
from the West, with nothing put forward to deter Israel’s next brutal
round of bombardments whenever they may occur. Weapons continue to flow
and diplomatic cover continues to shield justice.</p>
<p>Yet, Palestinian children, who will be the architects of any genuine
stable future, prove time and time again to profess a burning desire for
a better life, a demand for freedom and to settle for nothing less than
full liberation.</p>
<p>With world-leading <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/spread-word-palestine-has-one-worlds-highest-literacy-rates" target="_blank" rel="noopener">literacy rates</a>, forming dance troupes, parkour clubs and producing talented artists such as rising star thirteen-year-old rapper <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/music/2022/08/08/teen-rapper-mc-abdul-responds-to-attacks-on-gaza-with-new-song-what-is-it-worth/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MC Abdel</a>, Palestinian children in Gaza are still teaching the rest of the world life while walking through the wreckage:</p>
<p>“I always love to emphasize that positive side of us living in an
open-air prison. We’re doing our best in here. As I said, we don’t have a
lot of opportunities, but on the other side, we’re trying to create
those opportunities out of all the rubble that we’ve been living in for
more than 15 years,” Hind tells Palestine Deep Dive.</p>
<p>Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei also vividly illustrates this truth on Palestine
Deep Dive, describing how he saw Gaza’s children proudly wearing the
Eid clothes they had not been able to wear due to Israel’s attacks in
May 2021:</p>
<p>“It was a very ironic combination. You drive your car or you walk the
street, you see in one hand the debris and the destruction and the
destroyed houses, and on the other hand, you see very well-dressed
children, moving across the debris trying to go to school and get their
certificates”.</p>
<p>Of course, the mental health crisis in Gaza and the ongoing
injustices of Israel’s brutal apartheid and colonization are not limited
to children, they affect Palestinians of all ages.</p>
<p>But recently, what has become abundantly clear is that every bomb
Israel drops, and every day Israel’s siege of Gaza continues is an
intolerable injustice against those universally deemed most innocent,
children.</p>
<p>Under Israel’s siege, Gaza continues to be a one million child prison
and it is long overdue for governments across the West to finally
acknowledge this truth to end Israel’s impunity and for international
institutions including the United Nations to act upon this reality
without hesitation.</p>
<p><em>– Omar Aziz is Associate Director at Palestine Deep Dive. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.</em></p>
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