In 2014, nine years before Israel’s current annihilation efforts in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military undertook what it dubbed “Operation Protective Edge” in the same territory. The 51-day campaign cost the lives of 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children.
Shortly after the 2014 killings, a psychoanalyst I know in Barcelona sent me photographs he had acquired from a colleague in Gaza. The photos were drawings made by children in the town of Khuzaa, in Khan Yunis governorate, south of Gaza, near the border with Israel.
At first glance, many of the designs appear to be classic children’s artwork, depicting colorful houses, smiling snowmen, grass, clouds, the sun, etc. However, beyond the stylistic similarities, the illustrations depict a distinct and unsettling landscape, in which missiles, tanks, bulldozers and jet planes clearly occupy central positions in the young artists’ respective worlds.
In one drawing, for example, a projectile descending from the sky is about to impact an orange house with a red roof and a Palestinian flag flying above. In another, missiles from a plane are aimed at a group of smiling men. By offering a glimpse of the world seen through the eyes of Palestinian children, the artwork also serves as further evidence of the psychologically depraved nature of Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.
The children who drew these pictures are now teenagers – provided, of course, that they survived Israel’s latest carnage in Gaza, which killed nearly 10,000 people, including more than 4,800 children. There is not a single safe place in the entire territory, as Israel targets homes, schools and hospitals with abandon. Israeli military officers admitted to giving up pretending to have “surgical” precision.
Clearly, the transformation of daily life in Gaza into a veritable nightmare means that even if Israeli bombs stop falling, psychological trauma will remain the key to the game – probably to a greater degree than it was. Already. Five years ago, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) reported serious “mental health problems and psychological deterioration” among young people in Gaza. In 2020, the majority of children in the besieged enclave suffered from PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder.
And in May 2021 – in a quintessential episode of savage irony – twelve of the more than 60 children killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza in one week were participating in an NRC psychosocial program for war victims. trauma.
In addition to the physical massacre, therefore, there appears to be a calculated effort to also inflict psychological devastation on Gaza.
The English term “psyops” is not quite sufficient to describe what Israel is doing. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, psyops is a plural noun for “military operations generally aimed at influencing the enemy’s state of mind through non-combative means (such as distributing leaflets).”
Certainly, Israel has long excelled in the practice of dropping leaflets from planes on civilian populations in Palestine as well as Lebanon, often with instructions to evacuate a given area; Nowadays, such psychological operations can also be easily carried out via mobile phone.
However, given Israel’s habit of bombing people when they comply with evacuation orders, none of this really qualifies as a “non-combatant means.” In the case of the blockaded Gaza Strip, from which there is currently no escape route, this type of psychological warfare becomes even more mentally disturbing.
Of course, there is nothing terribly psychologically reassuring about living cooped up in a crowded patch of territory, even at a time when Israel is not waging an all-out war. In 2005, the year of Israel’s withdrawal – which was not from Gaza – the late Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj – founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program – condemned Israel for attempting to induce ” an acquired helplessness of the Palestinians of Gaza with the aim of making the entire population captive to fear and paralysis.”
In the 2009 documentary On Gaza’s Mind, El-Sarraj blamed the current Israeli occupation for the “disintegration” of society in the Gaza Strip and “generational problems” due to “the type of toxic trauma accumulated over years and years.” And the mental health crisis has only worsened in the years since, with rates of depression and suicide increasing.
The psychological effects of Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza, now 17 years old, cannot be overstated – nor can its contribution to crippling unemployment and poverty, factors which in turn further fuel general anxiety and depression. . The resulting lack of food, water and electricity in Gaza only exacerbates feelings of helplessness and prevents mental stability.
Meanwhile, Israel is simultaneously inflicting massive psychological trauma on the population of Gaza and blocking the importation of essential medicines, including psychiatric drugs, into the territory. Naturally, it also doesn’t help when Israel bombs hospitals and other health infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.
But what kind of future ultimately awaits Gaza when Israel persists in killing and traumatizing its children? In 2018, when the Israeli army killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza as part of the Great March of Return, the Washington Post reported on the mental health disaster in the enclave, highlighting the case of Mohammad Ayyoub, 14 years old.
As the Post points out, Ayyoub, at a very young age, had already experienced no less than three wars, which had left him “deeply traumatized”. The United States’ decision that year to move its embassy to Jerusalem “shocked” him, the article explains, and, after telling his mother that he would be willing to sacrifice his life for the city, he “ran away to a demonstration.” at the Gaza-Israel border on April 20, “where an Israeli sniper shot him in the head.”
Now that U.S. complicity in the physical and psychological devastation in Gaza has reached blatantly genocidal proportions – with the Israeli military systematically wiping out entire Palestinian families – it would perhaps not be surprising if more young Palestinians continue the path of martyrdom.
As Dr. El-Sarraj once told PBS, people are a “product of the environment”; if you impose on someone an environment of total “despair and hopelessness” – like a young Palestinian in Gaza who has “seen so much bombing, killing, killing, blood, humiliation” – you might just end up with “a martyr, someone who thinks that death is the beginning of life”.
Indeed, the Gaza Strip not only serves as Israel’s on-site laboratory for testing its weaponry, but it also serves as a testing ground for unhealthy mind games. And as Israel continues to preside over an unprecedented killing spree that can only be described as utterly psychotic, the question remains: what will the children of Gaza get from it now? Will there still be houses and sunshine, or will there only be blood and rubble?
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.