In Gaza, We Cannot Begin to Heal From Trauma

Three years of genocide in Gaza. Three years of death, destruction, despair, and annihilation. More than 74,000 people have been killed, including more than 1,400 since a ceasefire was supposed to take effect last October. Countless others have died from preventable causes due to the lack of medical care.

Those of us who survive live with permanent psychological trauma — trauma we cannot begin to recover from because the genocide has not stopped.

The scale of the psychological devastation is difficult to put into words. There are some figures that international organizations have begun to use to draw urgent attention to the "mental health crisis".

An analysis by the United Nations Population Fund concluded that more than a million children in Gaza need psychosocial support, and 96 percent of them feel death is near.

Among adolescents and young people, about 61 percent suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 38 percent from depression, and 41 percent from anxiety.

One study estimates that about 88 percent of adults in Gaza suffer from PTSD.

These are children and adults who had already been traumatized by repeated earlier wars. By 2020 — after three wars lasting months — half of Gaza's children had symptoms of PTSD. By 2022, 71 percent of adults were depressed.

These numbers cannot convey what it feels like to live with trauma when the chance of recovery is not even on the horizon.

We had known war before, but never total genocidal war. Nothing prepared us for that. Not fleeing our homes when the Israeli military invaded in 2008. Not taking shelter as Israeli air strikes flattened houses in 2012, 2014, and 2021.

Total, never-ending war is different. It overwhelms; it crushes because it destroys any hope of survival.

I have read about it in books. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms comes to mind. I remember the detailed descriptions of shelling and gunfire, of mangled limbs, bodies carried away on stretchers, doctors covered in blood like "butchers".

Death in Gaza is not like that. It has a smell: the smell of gunpowder, of burning rubble, of something rotting. It has a sound: the whine of missiles and muffled screams from beneath the rubble. It has the physical sensation of pure terror.

Nothing in the war prose I have read could have prepared me for what I saw and lived through.

In the first two months of the war, six houses in my neighborhood were bombed, and 60 of my neighbors were killed. A bomb fell so close that it shattered a wall and the windows of our home, injuring my sister, my mother, and me.

The air strikes were constant — day and night. During the day, smoke filled the air and blotted out the blue of the sky. At night, the darkness and dust were pierced by phone flashlights as we rushed to dig our neighbors out of the rubble.

I saw the body of a child trapped in a shattered wall next to a man's severed hand. I lifted the body of an infant from the rubble. I watched a mother crawl out of a collapsed house, blood streaming down her cheeks, while smoke-covered faces screamed and terrified neighbors clawed through shattered concrete walls looking for their relatives.

And on one horrifying day, I found Mohammed, my eight-year-old student, lying face down in the rubble. I turned him over to check for a pulse. No pulse, no breathing. He used to come to my home to learn English with his sister. The air strike took his innocent life but spared his sister. I pulled her out alive.

The classics are gentle. Gaza is not.

My trauma is lodged in my body like shrapnel. It tightens my chest when a drone flies overhead. It makes my hands tremble when I hear gunfire nearby. I feel numb. I cannot concentrate. I almost never smile.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially," Hemingway wrote.

Indeed, it is not only trauma that has overwhelmed us, the broken. It is also the guilt of the survivor. The best and noblest among us have been taken from us. I have lost relatives, friends, students: the brightest, the most generous, the kindest.

I no longer read to learn and enrich myself. I read to forget. I read until my vision blurs and sleep comes, as I try to keep images of death out of my head.

Fiction can no longer move me, shock me. I have seen humanity die and the rest of the world watch, indifferent. What could be more fictional than that?

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.