After 11 days of violence, Israel and Hamas agreed on a truce in Gaza on May 20. Israel is going back to relative normalcy, but things look very different in Gaza. “Even if the war stops, or there is a cease-fire or something, the people still have pain,” Ahmed, a 25-year-old Palestinian dentist in Gaza told me hours before the cease-fire. “We don’t even have a normal life to get back to.”
Accounting of the horrors of the conflict in English-language media seems to reveal a stark asymmetry, not only in the level of devastation but also in the type of trauma that is acknowledged. The death of more than 230 Palestinians, including 66 children, and the nearly 2,000 wounded by Israeli bombing is often reported alongside details of Israelis who were “treated for injuries in rocket attacks that caused panic and sent people rushing into shelters.”
Twelve Israelis have been killed, including two children. Those deaths are tragic and so is the mental anguish experienced by those who endured the rocket fire. Recognizing the humanity of Palestinians demands recognizing the complex internal and emotional life that each and every Palestinian has, just like every other person in the U.S. or Israel.
“One of the most consistent ways the media dehumanizes Palestinians in these moments is how they report Israeli injuries to include cases of ‘shock’ while never reporting on the constant mental trauma inflicted on Palestinians being exposed to far greater levels of violence,” tweeted Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian writer and a scholar at the Arab Center in Washington, DC.
During the 11-day war, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired “warning shots” before leveling high-rises that they claimed were also home to military assets belonging to Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. The IDF said they were signaling to people to flee before their homes were destroyed. But creating mass homelessness is only a humanitarian achievement if you believe that Palestinians deserve nothing more than to be alive.
Now that the bombing has ended, international attention likely will too, but the pain of Gaza won’t stop. Children will have lifelong trauma from the war, families will have no homes to return to, and many will either care for a wounded loved one or mourn another or both.
The pain of young Gazans started well before the 11 days of violence. Ahmed's sister, Alaa, has never left Gaza. The 33-year-old mother of three, who, like her brother asked that we use only her first name to protect her privacy, says that when she sees people on TV traveling or going to restaurants, she envies them. There are few jobs, so she and her family have no money and she accepts that she won’t be able to buy things like nice clothes for her daughters. She says she is used to having electricity for only a few hours a day and to drinking salty water. “I cannot step out of this trap,” Alaa told me. “We are in a prison. Gaza is a big prison.”
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, as well as one of the youngest (the median age of residents there is just 18). Many of them, including millennial siblings, have lived through four wars: 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and this most recent in 2021.
Since 2007, Alaa, Ahmed, and an estimated two million Palestinians living in Gaza, an area just about double the size of Washington DC, have been under an Israeli blockade of land, sea, and air, as well as Egyptian restrictions on a stretch of the strip’s border. A United Nations’ report from November 2020 concluded that the blockade has devastated Gaza’s economy, sending unemployment and poverty skyrocketing.
“After all the suffering you come and say that there is a war, that death is waiting for you? Why? What have we done? What is the mistake that we have done? Did we make a mistake to punish us? We are civilians,” Alaa asks, at a loss. “If they have problems with Hamas, why are they punishing us for 15 years?”
Every conflict leaves a different scar. “After 2014, I kept dreaming for several years about what happened to me, about what happened to us in the war… I kept waking up crying,” Alaa says. She doesn’t know exactly how this war will impact her, but she knows that it will: “We are all going to examine the trauma of this war and it is the worst war that I have witnessed.” Ahmed told me he hadn’t slept for days.
Some people can’t cope with the trauma and mental health resources are scarce in Gaza. “In Gaza, they really live death,” Isam Jwehan told me in Hebrew over the phone the day after the Israeli bombing of Gaza started. Isam is a Palestinian based in East Jerusalem who works connecting people coping with addiction to treatment. “Some of the people need the medication to cope. There is no access to psychological treatment.” Psychological pain is only one driver of drug-use demand, according to Isam. “A lot of people get injured and then they go to get painkillers and some of them get addicted to opioids,” he said.
A 2017 report published by the Palestinian National Institute of Public Health in collaboration with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Health Organization, estimated that more than 10,000 men over the age of 15 in Gaza are “high-risk drug users.” The most popular drugs were Tramadol (an opioid pill) and Lyrica (a non-opioid painkiller and antidepressant), while alcohol and intravenous drug use are rare.
A survey of people in Gaza conducted by the U.N. Development Fund for Women after the 23-day war in 2008 found an 8% increase in drug use after the violence ended — with higher increases for women. A study by Palestinian researchers on the impact of the 2014 war on university students in Gaza found that Tramadol use increased during the war and for some continued at least a month after the ceasefire. The authors wrote: “Addiction hazard is long-lasting after war and violence periods.” Studies in the United States have indicated that witnessing violence as children and adolescents is associated with increases in the likelihood of substance use. There is no reason to expect anything different for Palestinian children.
In July 2020, the suicide of young activist Suleiman Al-Ajour shed light on another growing crisis—and a taboo subject — among young people in Gaza. “It’s an escape bid. Enough!” were part of the last words Suleiman posted on Facebook. Gaza underwent a similar reckoning three years prior when 22-year-old student and writer, Mohanned Younis, died by suicide in 2017.
Alaa is among the many young Palestinians who don’t cope by using drugs. “We don’t seek refuge in drugs,” she says. “We seek Allah. We pray.” Ahmed hopes that President Biden stops military aid to Israel and that Americans “understand that their taxes are being used to kill innocent people.” (Biden has promised to provide “rapid humanitarian assistance” to Gaza, and also to help Israel resupply its Iron Dome missile defense system, in addition to a recently approved $735 million arms deal with Israel for precision missiles).
Hours before the ceasefire was announced, Alaa couldn’t see much beyond life and death. She said that she cries when she looks at her daughters, not sure which one she might lose. “We are not asking for more life. We just don’t want to die.” But Alaa, Ahmed, and all Palestinians deserve more than not dying. They deserve a fulfilling life, free of occupation and blockades. They also deserve their pain, mental anguish, and despair to be recognized and addressed. That shouldn't require a war.
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