'Life stops': Childhood in the West Bank shattered by Israeli raids

In the narrow alleys of Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, three children argue over whose encounter with the Israeli military was most striking—and who gets to tell it. Yanal, 14, wins the opening round with his language skills. He speaks three languages: Arabic, English and Spanish, and insists on telling his story in English.

“Life in the camp is complicated,” Yanal says because, in his words, there is nowhere to run when the army arrives. He often recalls a soccer game when soldiers stormed the field and there was no way out. Mustafa Abu Aliyah, 13, tells of a raid he encountered on his way to his grandfather’s house. The Israeli military fired live rounds and tear gas, he says. “We were in the middle of the fire.” He does not remember his first encounter with soldiers, “but I surely saw them when I was a baby because they always come here.”

His sister Diyar, 12, was in the middle of a piano lesson the last time the army came. “Whenever the army comes, there will be tear gas,” she says. “People will get beaten. Usually someone is injured or killed.” She compares life elsewhere. “I see children in other countries, in other worlds, living safely, but we cannot even step out our front door without suffering.”

The raids are so frequent that the children often cannot recall specific dates. But what they remember is the fear and the aggression of Israeli soldiers. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, Israeli forces conducted nearly 7,500 raids across the occupied West Bank, an average of 27 per day, up 37% from the same period in 2024.

A report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, published Tuesday, is titled “The very essence of childhood destroyed.” It examines how Israel has treated Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023. It concludes Israeli forces have killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children and wounded more than 44,000 across the occupied territories, most in Gaza – where it says the deliberate targeting of children is part of genocide. The report also documents mass arrests, torture, sexual violence, and attacks on schools and hospitals.

In the West Bank, the report notes a sharp increase in settler violence against children and killings by Israeli forces, including a two-year-old girl shot dead in January 2025. Children are held in Israeli detention without lawyers and with no word to their parents – a separation that could amount to enforced disappearance. Schools are also targeted: 85 schools across the West Bank are under demolition or suspension orders, others have been closed or attacked by soldiers and settlers.

The UN commission argues Israel has created conditions that keep Palestinians in a state of “diffuse, ambient terror, not requiring the constant of bombing to sustain its effectiveness.” Lemis Farraj, a psychologist and project coordinator at Shorouq in Dheisheh, stresses that children’s physical and mental health are inseparable. The report calls this continuous traumatic stress, distinct from post-traumatic stress disorder, because there is no single event from which to recover. Danger comes not just from experiencing a raid, but from the fear of waiting for future raids.

Diyar explains that when the army enters the neighborhood, she must stay home and wait, no matter her plans. “Our life stops,” she says. Mustafa, her brother, says repetition has dulled his fear. “When I see the army, I am used to it and I am no longer scared.” Farraj sees the same thing in the children she treats: flinching at a normal sound, believing a raid has begun, and regressing – learned skills suddenly lost.

A few alleys away, five-year-old Khour Hammad also experiences the raids. Both of her parents are in prison. Israeli forces detained her father in July 2023 and her mother last March. Khour remembers the night the army came for her mother. Half asleep, she heard men’s voices and thought her father had come home. She climbed out of bed to greet him. Instead, she saw soldiers inside the house. They tried to interrogate Khour. She says “she felt like she was going to throw up.” Holding an old family photo, she lights up immediately, points to mother Islam Amarna and father Osama Hammad, and recounts memories.

While Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank have different experiences, the UN identifies the same root cause: a military occupation described as “a long-term regime of domination, subjugation and oppression.” Psychologist Farraj adds that children are affected not only by their own traumatic experiences but by what is passed down from parents and grandparents. “The first generation of the Nakba lived in shock and passed it to their children,” she says, referring to the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians after the state of Israel was established in 1948. The report itself notes that Palestinian refugees, now in their fifth generation, have internalized the “sense of dispossession from the Nakba” along with current experiences of occupation.

Israel’s violence and forced displacement have been transmitted through generations of Palestinians, compounding as the cycle repeats. Farraj says trauma recovery depends on stability: family support, schooling, safe spaces and predictable routines – all precarious under Israeli occupation. For Khour, that stability begins with her parents. “I want the whole world to listen and see my picture,” Khour says, “and to free my parents from prison.”