The National, By Hugh Naylor:
They were best friends, his family said. Inseparable.
The three-year-old does not grasp what happened on the evening of November 19, when an Israeli missile exploded in the living room of the family home in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, killing three members of his family: his father, an older brother, and his twin.
“When he sees pictures of his Suhaib, he speaks to him like he’s still alive,” said his mother, Aamna Hijazi, in her early 40s. “We try to tell him that Suhaib is gone but he doesn’t understand.”
While he may be too young to comprehend the loss, Musab is not alone in struggling with the aftermath of those eight days of war last November, fought between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, which killed 158 Palestinians and six Israelis.
Scores of other children, their families and friends in this besieged territory are still wrestling with the emotional and physical trauma of losing loved ones.
The fighting started after Israel assassinated a Hamas official. Gaza militants fired rockets at Israel, which responded with airstrikes on the territory.
During the holy month of Ramadan – the first since the war ended – coming to terms with such tragedy will be as difficult as ever, they said.
“We have a situation where large numbers of these people are still suffering from severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Saleh Mohsen, a mental-health counsellor at primary and secondary schools in Gaza. “The victims are in desperate need of psychological intervention, but many either don’t seek out such support, or it’s just not available to them.”
Mr Mohsen holds group-therapy sessions for parents who lost children during the November war. In some cases, he said, they suffer from extended periods of denial.
“I counselled one man who simply didn’t believe his son had died,” he said. “For months after the war, he would go to the cemetery and try to dig up his son’s grave because he believed he was still alive. His family would find him at the cemetery and every time, they would have to explain to him again and again that his son was gone.”
Thirty-three children in Gaza were killed during the fighting, according to Defence for Children International Palestine Section, a non-governmental organisation based in Geneva, Switzerland. Most of them were killed by Israeli bombs.
On its website, the organisation says 561 children have been killed – including 352 during Israel’s three-week war on Gaza that began in December 2008 – during fighting with Israel in the territory since 2005.
Beset by continuing conflict, an Israeli blockade and grinding poverty, Gaza’s 1.7 million residents seldom find respite. Mr Mohsen recalled another one of his patients, a mother, who is still tormented by what she endured during the 2008-2009 war, which killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
After an airstrike caused a fire at her home, she climbed to the upper level of the house with her four-year-old son. In panic, she threw him onto the street below, thinking that would save him from burning to death.
The child suffered a broken arm, but his mother never overcame the guilt of that decision, Mr Mohsen said.
“During our sessions, all she would do is cry and say my words are worthless, that I never had to experience what she experienced,” he said.
Back in the Hijazi home, Aamna must now try to raise her six children without her husband, Fouad. He was 46 and worked as a school security guard.
Categories: Arab World, Asia, Israel
may Allah save the gaza people