Contributor: Gaza remains a crisis of children’s mental health
As a psychologist in the occupied West Bank, I spent my career sitting across from children carrying burdens that no child should ever know; Lives were shaped not by playgrounds or classrooms, but by constant fear.
I know this fear because I have experienced it myself. I remember, when I was less than 5 years old, Israeli soldiers broke into our house in the middle of the night and took my father from his bed. Knocking on the door, screams, terror; All these memories are still vivid.
Children waking up from nightmares believe that Israeli soldiers have come for their families.
Children startled by the slamming of the door.
Children who can recognize the sounds of drones and warplanes before they multiply or divide.
I helped them overcome arrests, home demolitions, settler violence, humiliation at checkpoints, and the crushing, silent stress of growing up never feeling safe.
I joined the Palestine Red Crescent in 2021 because I knew that this community was one of the few aid organizations willing to go where the need was greatest—in the red zones, near the separation wall, near illegal settlements, and even in active conflict zones. Mental health services for Palestinians are scarce and often inaccessible. If children were suffering in the hardest to reach places, I wanted to be there for them.
I thought I understood the trauma.
I thought I knew how to guide kids through fear.
I thought I had the tools.
Then on January 29, 2024, the phone rang. There was a call from Gaza.
Five-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped in a small car, surrounded by the bodies of six of her recently murdered relatives. Israeli tanks were approaching. Gunshots could be heard in the background. He was whispering into the phone so that no one nearby could hear him.
“I’m scared. They’re shooting at us. … Please come and get me,” he repeated over and over.
We tried to reach him for hours. Our ambulance was a few minutes away, but it needed permission from Israeli authorities to enter the area. We waited for the permission, which came hours later, but was ignored.
In our operations room in Ramallah, time slowed down at an unbearable pace. With each passing minute, the frustration and helplessness grew worse.
All I could do was talk to him.
How can I keep a child hopeful when he or she is alone among deceased family members?
How can I make him feel safe when he’s surrounded by tanks?
How can I keep him conscious and get him to focus on anything other than the immediate trauma?
I kept reminding him to breathe. To keep talking. To stay awake.
Most importantly, there was a recurring thought in my mind: He is 5 years old. He’s only 5 years old. He’s not old enough to tie his shoes. He’s not old enough to read on his own. But he was still alone and asking strangers to come and save him.
His voice grew weaker towards the end. He said he was bleeding. “From where?” I asked. “My mouth, my stomach, my legs; everywhere,” she whispered. I tried to stay calm and told her to use her blouse to wipe the blood. Then he said something I will never forget: “I don’t want it. My mother will get tired of doing my laundry.”
Even then—alone, terrified, injured, and hungry—she thought about her mother, who had extra laundry to wash. These were the last words I heard.
We lost Hind that day. We also lost two brave colleagues, Yousef Zeino and Ahmad Almadhoun, when their ambulance was shot while waiting for permission to reach him. They were just a few minutes away.
Hind’s story is no exception. One of tens of thousands of children in Gaza.
For more than two years, children in Gaza wake up every morning to displacement, loss, violence and lack of access to even the most basic needs. At least 20,000 children have been killed since October 2023; An average of at least 24 children are killed every day; which is the equivalent of an entire classroom. And we realize that this is a huge undercount with so many children trapped under the rubble. Tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes. Schools collapsed. Hospitals were destroyed, doctors and medical staff were detained and targeted.
This is not just a man-made humanitarian disaster. This is also a mental health crisis.
Children in Gaza are not only surviving bombs and displacement; They carry an overwhelming psychological burden that grows heavier with each passing day. Nearly every child is at risk of famine or falling ill from preventable diseases. more than 650,000 have no access to school and more than 1.2 million Children need urgent psychological support. Reports on the field show that More than 39,300 children We lost one or both parents, including nearly 17,000 people who were orphaned. Hundreds of thousands of people live in a world defined by fear and instability, with nowhere safe to go.
It is impossible to recover when the threat never stops and when schools and healthcare systems collapse. Under these unbearable conditions, the trauma does not subside; accumulates. The results may be irreversible.
We are witnessing the psychological injury of an entire generation.
Immediate action is imperative. A genuine and lasting ceasefire is the first step towards stability, but must be followed by the rapid restoration of health and education, along with continued investment in psychosocial and mental health support. Mental health cannot be an afterthought in humanitarian intervention; but it should be centrally located from the very beginning. Without these interventions, the psychological toll will deepen further and have long-term consequences for the well-being of an entire generation and the future of the Palestinian people.
And above all, children need to be protected from ongoing violence because no therapy can compete with ongoing trauma.
Hind’s last words will haunt me forever. The world failed him. He disappointed Palestinian children. But there’s still time to save what’s left. “Through the movieVoice of Hind RecepHer voice will continue to transcend borders, carrying the truth that children in Gaza and the West Bank experience every day.
This isn’t just another story. It’s a call we must answer.
Nisreen Qawas is a psychologist at the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
