News.Net – AFP, Guillaume Lavallee, 3 August 2014
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| Palestinian children affected by the war gather around a UN volunteer at a school in Jabalia as part of a United Nations community mental health programmes in the Gaza Strip, on August 2, 2014 |
Ask any
child in Gaza to do a drawing and the resulting picture is likely to be a house
being bombed by a fighter plane.
In the
strife-torn Palestinian enclave, thousands of children are suffering from the
trauma of war but resources to help them are scarce.
At a school
in the northern town of Jabalia which has been converted into a refuge,
specialist teachers hand out paper and coloured crayons to a motley band of
shaken up children, asking them to draw whatever is in their head.
Jamal Diab,
a nine-year old with red flecks in his brown hair, draws his dead grandfather.
Under the drawing, he writes in Arabic: "I am sad because of the
martyrs."
"A few
days ago, aircraft bombarded our house. We had to leave quickly and leave
everything behind. It was dangerous," the lad breathes timidly as he shows
his drawing.
Tiny
seven-year old Bara Marouf shows a drawing of his grandfather without any legs.
He was seriously wounded in an air strike.
In the
classroom, the same sketch comes up repeatedly: an aircraft filling the sky and
bombarding a house, subtitled with the caption "I want to go home".
"Who
is afraid of aircraft?" the teacher asks the children sitting in a circle
on a mat.
Immediately
little hands push towards the sky and high-pitched voices clamour:
"Me", "me", "me".
"Me,
I'm afraid of missiles and planes. Half our house was destroyed. We left it to
come here," explains Itimad Subh, an 11-year-old girl with sparkling eyes.
'They
blame themselves'
According
to the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, about 300 children have been
killed since the start on July 8 of Israel's offensive against Hamas militants
firing rockets into the Jewish state.
Those who
are still alive try not to internalise too much the violence they have
experienced, seen and heard.
Inside the
school, groups of youths attend half-hour sessions one after the other.
The two
teachers, patient and exhausted, their faces enclosed in a tight veil, ask the
children to jump on the spot and call out, then to wave their arms like someone
disco dancing, to expel accumulated black thoughts, frustration and stress.
"The
children have all lived extreme experiences," says Dr. Iyad Zaqut, a
psychiatrist who manages the United Nations community mental health programmes
in the Gaza Strip.
"It is
very difficult for children to grasp what is happening, why their life is at
risk, why they have to leave their homes, why they have to resettle, why they
witness very traumatising scenes," Zaqut said.
"To
prevent children from processing and thinking about all these issues, we try to
distract them, to help them live some joy, to have a little fun inside the
shelter.
"Generally,
when they are exposed to traumatic events, the way they perceive the incident
can be very distorted, they might blame themselves, they might blame their
neighbours and this blaming is very harmful," the psychiatrist said.
"We
try to reprocess these distorted ideas," he explained, noting that he has
diagnosed cases of post-traumatic stress and adolescent depression.
No
therapy in wartime
But it is
hard to make much progress with the therapy.
In the Gaza
Strip, 460,000 people -- more than a quarter of the population -- have been
displaced by the fighting and have gone to stay with relatives or found refuge
at UN shelters.
Fewer than
100 specialist teachers are "treating" more than 100,000 children.
Only in
exceptional cases do the children have access to one-on-one meetings with
psychologists and psychiatrists. And even fewer get a follow up.
Gaza has
been in the firing line of military operations in 2008-2009 and again in 2012
but the consequences have been greater during this current war between Israel
and Hamas.
UNICEF
estimates that 326,000 minors in Gaza are in need of psychological help.
The
children and adolescents sheltering in the UN centres can at least attend the
group classes but hundreds of thousands of others affected by the war are left
to wander unhelped through devastated neighbourhoods.
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