Miraculously, therapeutic care for Gaza’s deeply traumatised people is happening
A drawing by 10-year-old Hala featured in GCMHP’s December 2024 report
Victoria Brittain reports in Middle East Eye on 10 December 2024:
ore than a year after the genocide began to engulf Gaza before the eyes of the world and as many people have stopped watching horrors they cannot bear to see, a new professional mental health report lays out just how Gaza’s traumatised children are living in unthinkable torment.
Four months after its first report on the mental health impact of Israel’s military assault on every aspect of life in the besieged strip, where Gaza’s mental health professionals are working, the Gaza Community Mental Programme (GCMHP) released its second detailed report: “There, People Suffer And Die.”
The new report’s details will further trigger widespread disgust at the staunch refusal of the US, UK and a dwindling number of other countries to heed world opinion, stop arming Israel and force a ceasefire in Gaza.
Despite the “unimaginably challenging context” of their work, after many more forced displacements into more crowded and unsafe spaces where malnutrition, starvation, lack of clean water, loss of innumerable family members and homes, schools, universities, hospitals, these GCMHP medical professionals work on.
Difficult access to fuel and reliance on solar power for internet access always make administrative work exhausting. They have mourned three colleagues killed by Israeli bombing, their three centres destroyed, and, like every Palestinian in Gaza, innumerable personal losses of their own family members.
Nonetheless, in recent weeks, they have repaired and opened a new clinic in Gaza City, following the opening of others in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah over the last six months.