The ‘lost generation’ of children in Gaza, who are brought up in a world of only terror and violence. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KARL SCHEMBRI
Ensherah Zakkout, a Gazan psychologist, is on her way to a home visit in Beit Lahiya, but from the outset this is clearly not an ordinary visit.
To begin with, there is no home. It was flattened last January by Israeli bulldozers, with Kamal Awaja, his wife and five children inside.
Ten-year-old Subhi was huddled with his father and younger brother Ibrahim when on 4 January 2009 the first bomb hit the house in the dead of night, at the start of the first land attack.
Kamal told his sons not be afraid if he fainted, and that was when a piece of shrapnel ripped through Ibrahim’s abdomen and wounded Subhi in his head. As they regained their senses under the rubble, Subhi realised his nine-year-old brother was dying.
“He kissed Ibrahim on his forehead while he lay dying,” his mother, Wafa, says. “Subhi saw death with his eyes.”
After the bombardment, bulldozers started flattening the houses to make way for the incursion. Kamal told his family to pretend they were dead as the soldiers passed by them.
Israelis thought we were all dead, but once they passed we could not go anywhere,” Kamal said. The village in northern Gaza bordering with Israel was under intense attack until the troops made it into central Gaza, making it impossible for the wounded to go to hospital. “We had to remain next to Ibrahim’s dead body for four days.”
Since the day of his brother’s death, his parents say Subhi has changed completely. Formerly a high achiever at school, he can now barely stand five minutes with a book. The dwindling grades are accompanied by alarming cases of aggression towards other school children and teachers. In the tent where his family is now living, he repeatedly beats his sisters for no apparent reason, destroying their toys and spending most of his time alone or playing violent video games at an internet cafe nearby.
On the day of the psychologist’s visit, Subhi’s father was preparing to accompany his son at school where a disciplinary board was to decide what to do with him after, yet again, he beat up another boy.
“We have lost all control on him,” his mother, in her eighth month of pregnancy, says. “He terrifies his siblings all the time. He used to be first in class but now he is always out looking for trouble.”
“Subhi feels he is totally unprotected; the war taught him that not even home was safe and that his father was powerless,” says Zakkout, the psychologist and herself the mother of a child killed by Israeli soldiers three years ago. “The trauma Subhi suffered, if we’re unsuccessful with therapy, can lead to anywhere – from becoming anti-social and criminal to fanatic religious behaviour. His is the normal reaction to abnormal circumstances.”
A lost generation
The ‘normal reaction’ which mental health professionals and child workers fear in Gaza is the path to radicalisation. Subhi’s family has never engaged in militancy – his father is a Palestinian Authority clerk who was stopped working in Gaza by Hamas. Yet the threat that young children – even from moderate families – might be lured into a militant, extremist lifestyle is real, surrounded as they are by images glorifying ‘martyrs’ and Islamist rhetoric.
“All Gaza’s children are at risk,” said GCMHP senior psychologist Hasan Zeyada. “They are learning that the only way to tackle every obstacle in life is through violence and aggression. They feel helpless and powerless, that parents can’t protect them. That leads them to identify with the fighter or even the Israeli soldier representing absolute power, like God.”
Living under total siege as opposed to Palestinian children in the West Bank, their only contact with foreigners is the sight of Israeli soldiers destroying their homes and killing their relatives. According to the UN agency chief helping Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) John Ging, a whole generation of children – who make up half of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – risks being lost forever.
“If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said. “It’s worse now than it ever was before. A whole generation of Palestinians will have never got out of the besieged strip, never interacted with foreigners or even met Israelis except as enemy soldiers intent on killing and destruction. Their violent behaviour and disrespect to their parents is symptomatic of the desperation they are growing up in.”
A study published by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme after the Israeli aggression shows his concerns are well-founded. Just under 50% of children aged 6-17, who were exposed to the last war that lasted 23 days and claimed the lives of around 1,400 Palestinians, think “often” or “almost always” of seeking revenge on whoever is responsible for the death of people close to them.
“A six-year-old asked me why God created the Jews,” Zeyada says. “They do not even differentiate between Jews and Israelis.”
Even if the responses are to be expected, the figures remain alarming and show that Subhi is far from alone in the Gaza Strip. Over 60% of Gazan children showed severe to very severe post-traumatic stress disorder according to the same study.
In the last war, 50% of children lost a close relative or friend, 54% witnessed assassination of people by rockets. Over 90% heard the shelling of their area by Israeli artillery and the sonic sounds of jetfighters, and an equal amount witnessed shelling on the ground and saw mutilated bodies on TV.
A particular case highlighted in the UN investigation into Gaza war crimes headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone speaks of a mother whose children aged three to 16 had witnessed the killing of their father in their own house. As Israeli soldiers forcefully questioned her and vandalised the house, the children asked their mother whether they would be killed as well.
“Their mother felt the only comfort she could give them was to tell them to say the Shehada, the prayer recited in the face of death,” the report says.
As many as 69% of children were forced to flee their home during the war, and a staggering 99% said they did not feel safe at home and felt neither the family nor anyone else could protect them.
But talking of post-traumatic stress can be misleading as the younger generation is “living an ongoing trauma” according to Hasan Zeyada. Even before the war, the crippling siege and fierce factional divisions were already leaving their toll on children.
“The siege, internal divisions and the war create an overwhelming feeling of helplessness,” Dr Zeyada said. “All the people feel they cannot do anything to stop the violations. It’s a very painful emotion.”
That sense of helplessness and lack of protection explains children’s widespread use of toy guns whenever they play, Zeyada says.
While adult men used to the culture of being family leaders get more withdrawn in the face of helplessness, women are left making important family decisions on their own, says Heba Zayyam, an officer working at the UN development fund for women.
This is also forcing young girls to abandon dreams of furthering their studies and developing.
“I studied at the University of Jordan 10 years ago,” Zayyam said. “Now sending girls to study abroad is frowned upon. There is a whole new generation who never left Gaza, who don’t know what a cinema looks like, and who don’t know how the world looks like out there.”
Children, UNRWA’s John Ging says, are being punished for a crime they did not commit.
“Israel designated Gaza as a hostile entity after Hamas won the election, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that breeds violent hostility,” Ging said. “Half of the Gazan population is made of kids; they didn’t vote for anybody. We’re in a self-reinforcing cycle of rhetoric and violence.”
Political fragmentation – which took a violent head in the 2007 civil war when Fatah troops loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas were ousted from Gaza by Hamas – permeates as early as the primary school years, with five-year-olds wearing green or yellow tops in support Hamas or Fatah. Children are also victims of physical punishment, in schools and in families – an issue which Dr Zeyada calls “one of the main problems of Gaza’s social reality”.
The same Goldstone report – which accuses both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes – speaks of “indoctrination programmes allegedly introduced by the Gaza authorities, and of a process of ideological and political polarisation.” Such programmes “have a high potential for imposing models of education at odds with human rights values and with a culture of peace and tolerance.”
Meanwhile according to UNICEF, 280 schools damaged by the war still cannot be rehabilitated due to the ongoing blockade. UNRWA itself hosts 200,000 children in its schools across Gaza, but it can’t get the raw materials to rebuild schools, to furnish classes with desks and distribute text books – all items that are banned by Israel.
Striving for normality
At the Qattan Centre for the Child in Gaza City, Director Reem Abu Jaber leafs through dozens of drawings by children after the war. The recurrent images are disturbing, coming as they are from children under 15. Tanks, missiles, helicopters, phosphorus falling from the sky, bombs and corpses fill the pages, but there are also glimpses of flowers and the sun shining over houses.
The centre runs a free, impressive state of the art library and organises free lessons in creative writing, literacy, web design, film making, critical thinking and empowerment classes for parents.
“You don’t need a stamp or a passport to read a book,” Abu Jaber says “A book can take you somewhere else, and that’s what our children need right now.”
The centre is a veritable oasis of learning and entertainment for thousands of children under 15, and the Qattan Foundation running it is lucky to be a registered charity in the UK enabling it to receive funding from abroad. All the other Gazan organisations have been otherwise cut off since the Hamas takeover.
Yet even for the Qattan Centre, replacing books and buying paper for children is proving extremely difficult, having to wait long months until orders are somehow smuggled in by travellers coming through the Erez crossing from Israel or the Rafah border with Egypt. Tiles lining the colourful halls and classes that are broken have to be replaced with what is available.
“We were very lucky the building was not hit in the war,” Abu Jaber says.
The success of Qattan’s oversubscribed classes is also a cause of concern for Abu Jaber, concerned that there are no outlets catering for children over 15.
“After that, you just have Fatah and Hamas,” she said.
It is also the age from when young people are becoming increasingly addicted to Tramadol, the powerful painkiller with a narcotic effect leaving its users sedated for hours. Despite the Hamas government’s belated crackdown on the drug’s abuse, mental health professionals have seen an alarming rise since the war. Tunnel workers, most of them children, are believed to be on a constant supply to forget about their lethal surroundings.
US Actress and children’s rights activist Mia Farrow spoke about children’s widespread trauma but also highlighted glimmers of resilience during her visit to Gaza last October as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
“A teacher said that when they hear a loud noise they look at the sky and scream and run and some will cry,” said Farrow, who also related stories of children whose houses were bombed around them, whose relatives were killed, and one who was placed by Israeli soldiers with her family in a hole and worried they would be buried alive. “A little girl said I don’t know what will happen next, and yet I was told by a group of children I want to be a doctor, I want to be a teacher. The children were full of hope and determination.”
Back in the Awajas’ tent in Beit Lahiya, Kamal the father has tears in his eyes as he speaks about his dead son Ibrahim. The psychologist tries consoling him, but it is time to head to school with Subhi to face the disciplinary board.
According to figures released by Defence for Children International, Ibrahim is one of 352 children killed during Operation Cast Lead, as the Israeli offensive was known. And that’s far from the high price that a whole generation of children is having to pay.
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