Opinion

Gaza’s persistent traumatic stress disorder

Most children in Gaza experience PTSD, and this has also impacted the children in Ahmed Dremly's family, as he watches his young cousin, Little Mansour, struggle to cope with the loss of his grandfather.

It is nearly 2 a.m. in Gaza. It’s a quiet night. No drones. No bombs. Then shrieks. And yet more shrieks.

This has been the case with my cousin, five-year-old Mansour, who regularly wakes sweaty after wetting the bed. Mansour has a recurring nightmare of his grandfather, also Mansour, 69, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last May.

I remember my uncle shouting at my cousins and me asking if anyone had annoyed little Mansour. My uncle had 14 grandchildren, but I bet that little Mansour was his favorite child, maybe because he had his name.

The day before Eid Al-Adha, my uncle Mansour grabbed his cane and walked to nearby stores to buy some tomato and salty fish, called feseekh, in preparation for spending the Muslim holiday with his family.

During his short walk, two Israeli missiles struck a car next to him in the street. My uncle didn’t expect to be targeted. As always, Israel claims that it defends itself, and it accurately identifies its target bank. 

Mansour Dremly. (Photo courtesy of the author)

My uncle and four other civilians, all of whom were my neighbors, were killed in the blasts. We weren’t just shocked and saddened by this massacre, but we also felt as if we lost parts of ourselves. Old Mansour, the mukhtar, or head of my family, is no more here.

Everyone in my family noticed the changes in the family childrens’ behaviors after the killing of my uncle Mansour. They show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, increasing signs of distress like bed-wetting, nightmares, and panic from loud sounds, little Mansour included.

A July report from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor found “241 children lost one or both parents as a result of the bombing, about 5,400 children lost their homes (completely destroyed or severely damaged), and 42,000 children had their homes partially damaged.”

Sociologist Mark Ayyash, who has studied violence, social and political theory, wrote at the time of the escalation between Israel and Gaza, “From the very first years of childhood, Palestinians in Gaza receive a clear message from Israel and indeed from the world: you are not human, and we do not care.”

“Some children in this world get to gaze at the stars, kickstarting their sense of wonderment and discovery,” Ayyash said. “The children in Gaza are forced instead to gaze at stones, at the rubble. “

Palestinian children take a yoga lesson organized by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Gaza City on January 10, 2018. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA Images)

Little Mansour’s mother tells me that he refuses to go to his kindergarten, saying, “Where is my grandfather? I need my grandfather.” As my uncle used to deliver him to his nursery school every day, little Mansour refused to go to the kindergarten after the Israeli airstrike killed old Mansour.

As I have a degree in English, I used to gather neighborhood children on Fridays and read English stories to them. I enjoy teaching and entertaining them. My uncle’s house is next to ours. So, little Mansour was always the first on the scene, but after his grandfather was killed, he just came twice. The five-year-old boy who was full of innocence and life has become an introvert.

Little Mansour’s mother, Dova, told me recently that her son asked: “to come down to the grave of his grandfather to give him a kiss, when his father and I took him and his sister Sham, 4, to the cemetery.”

“I couldn’t answer, but I cried when Sham asked me, ‘Is my grandfather going to wake up and go home with us, mama?’” she added.

Each of Gaza’s children has many questions that must be answered. Like Talia, 3, my niece, questions, “Why does Israel want to kill me with an airstrike? Does Israel kill other children across the world the same way it kills us?’ 

My uncle Mansour was one of the many victims who was killed in cold blood. War is never over. In Gaza, there is no post-trauma, we’re all still mid-trauma, and the little ones pay the largest price.

Children under 15 make up about half of the two million people living in Gaza. During the 11-day escalation in May, 256 were Palestinians were killed including 66 children, and another 540 children were injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. 

Since September 2000 to 1,727 Palestinian minors in the Gaza Strip have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.


Ahmed Dremly
Ahmed Dremly is a creative writer and translator from the Gaza Strip. Follow him on Twitter at @ahmedhodremly.


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This was posted by JLewisDickerson in “The Meaning of Apartheid For Israel” ( https://mondoweiss.net/2021/10/the-meaning-of-apartheid-for-israel/ ), it is even more apt for this article on Gaza:

https://themarkaz.org/the-new-politics-of-exclusion-gaza-as-prologue/

Gaza is an experiment where policy is used to exclude and technology is used to control. In these obscene spaces new weapons and new means of surveillance are continuously being tested, to the great benefit of Israeli industry. But the drones used for surveillance and killing or the undetectable spying software—the latest instance of which is Pegasus—are far from being the most terrifying exports from Israel: they pale before the automated decision system that is built into them….For growing numbers of human beings, the new politics is simply about removing the other from sight. As a policy, the excluded may not be killed but are owed nothing—no land, no income, no protection, and certainly no place or home—except mere food and water…

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Lest we forget, a reminder:
To quote the independen­t and highly respected human rights organizati­on Human Rights Watch: “…Israel will continue to be an Occupying Power [of the Gaza Strip] under internatio­nal law and bound by the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention because it will retain effective control over the territory and over crucial aspects of civilian life. Israel will not be withdrawin­g and handing power over to a sovereign authority – indeed, the word ‘withdrawa­l’ does not appear in the [2005 disengagem­ent] document at all… The IDF will retain control over Gaza’s borders, coastline, and airspace, and will reserve the right to enter Gaza at will. According to the Hague Regulation­s, ‘A territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been establishe­d and can be exercised’­. Internatio­nal jurisprude­nce has clarified that the mere reposition­ing of troops is not sufficient to relieve an occupier of its responsibi­lities if it retains its overall authority and the ability to reassert direct control at will.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.” The ICRC thus unequivocally stated that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law embodied in the Geneva Conventions. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by Israel, bans collective punishment of a civilian population.

People ask: what’s the connection between the Palestinian issue and Black Lives Matter, what’s all this ‘intersectionality’ nonsense? The connection is that both issues have to do with controlling large populations that are considered undesirable – how do we keep Blacks from voting, how do we keep Palestinians from having political power?

In the case of Black people the mechanism of control is the War On Drugs – lock ’em up for smoking a joint (this has been openly admitted – https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminalize-black-people/ ). How do we keep 5 million Palestinians in a state of subjugation? Different techniques, same goals.

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To quote Dov Weisglass, then senior advisor to Israel’s PM, the late Ariel Sharon:
“‘The significance of the [then proposed] disengagement plan [implemented in 2005] is the freezing of the peace process,’ Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass has told Ha’aretz. ‘And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda….’ Weisglass, who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan, was speaking in an interview with Ha’aretz for the Friday Magazine. ‘The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,’ he said. ‘It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.’” (Top PM Aide: Gaza Plan Aims to Freeze the Peace Process, Ha’aretz, October 6, 2004)

I want to thank you for your creative writing. Such a wonderful article. Ahmed describes the experience of PTSD on Gaza’s children in a realistic way.