Post-traumatic stress symptoms displayed by the Palestinian children

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Giles Fraser@Rafah
Monday October 11, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1324405,00.html

At the Sunrise and Hope children's centre, next to the refugee camp in Khan Yunis, I found myself a game. Dozens of small boys gathered for an impromptu replay of England v France. Amid the ubiquitous graffiti celebrating the heroes of the intifada, we spoke the globalised language of football. "Zidane, Zidane, he is Arab," they chuckled.

Afterwards, they showed me their burns and bullet wounds, proud of the scars that marked them out as mini-martyrs in the fight against oppression.

But the bravado of the football field was just that. A nurse from the mother-and-baby clinic in the rabbit-warren Darraj district of Gaza City, where more than 10,000 families are registered, spoke of how all the children suffer bed-wetting and nightmares. Many are too afraid to sleep alone.

The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme has catalogued a full range of post-traumatic stress symptoms displayed by the children: stammering, depression, headaches, stomach pains, the inability to concentrate. Behind the cheeky grins, the shooting and shelling is educating the children of Gaza on a daily syllabus of fear.

Pent-up frustration leads to hyperactivity in school. The centre holds daily anger-management classes. For an hour before school the children throw balls against a wall. In the last few years, academic results have plummeted.

It is little wonder. Wella was shot by a sniper during lessons. Unlike the boys, she was close to tears as she showed us a six-inch wound in the centre of her stomach. "Every time I have a bath I remember when I was injured. I am angry with the soldiers. Why did they do this? I didn't do anything. I was in school."

Hamas won't need to teach these kids how to graduate from throwing balls to throwing stones and bombs; they are learning all they need to learn about violence from the Israeli Defence Force.

All the children have their stories. Leaa Hussein Najim is 10. "At 7.30 in the morning the Israeli bulldozers started destroying our house fence. The walls started falling. Big rocks fell down on my leg and it was injured. I was not able to stand on it. My mother carried me while my father carried my grandmother, but he fell down because he was in a hurry. Afterwards I went back. I didn't know where our house was. Everything was under destruction, my books and uniforms."

Aya Al-Shaer is 13. "We felt very afraid. My father said to the bulldozer: 'Please give me time to take our furniture out of the house.' But the bulldozer didn't agree, and started shooting at my father. He was shot in the back and the leg."

The stories go on. Rouan said she "sleeps with tears every night". Another boy from the Brazil area of Rafah returned to search out his clothes and books among the rubble. Finding nothing, he went to school in his pyjamas.

A few hundred yards from six-storey concrete flats, along the ironically named Philadelphi road, a huge Israeli barrier spreads its concrete wings along the length of Rafah. We picked our way through the chewed-up wreckage created by tanks and bulldozers.

And then, out of nowhere, without us having crossed any sort of line and with no warning, a machine gun from the nearest watch-tower opened fire. As we dropped to the ground and scattered, a woman in a nearby tenement continued to hang out her washing. She had seen it all before.

Despite all this, children continue to play. The Gaza strip is one of the most densely populated places on the planet and the majority of the population is under 16. The local zoo may have been destroyed, the football field is far too dangerous, and the beach has been appropriated by settlers and soldiers. Some play football in the cemetery. In Gaza, death is never very far away.