Three Years Into Gaza's Genocidal War, Survivors Face a Trauma From Which Recovery Is Impossible

Three years after the start of what the author describes as a genocidal war in Gaza, survivors remain trapped in a cycle of unrelenting psychological devastation, with no realistic prospect of healing while the violence continues. In a first-person account published by Al Jazeera, writer Said Alsaloul paints a harrowing picture of life in the besieged enclave, where death, destruction and despair have become permanent fixtures of daily existence rather than temporary hardships to be endured and overcome.

According to the account, more than 74,000 people have been killed over the three-year period, including more than 1,400 since a so-called ceasefire took effect in October of the previous year. The author notes that countless additional deaths have occurred that were entirely preventable, the result of a collapsed healthcare system and the absence of basic medical supplies, equipment and functioning facilities needed to treat the wounded and the sick.

Beyond the direct death toll, the psychological damage inflicted on the surviving population is described as staggering and almost impossible to convey in words. International organisations have begun compiling statistics in an effort to draw urgent global attention to what they characterise as a mental health crisis of historic proportions unfolding among Gaza's civilian population, particularly its children.

Analysis conducted by the United Nations Population Fund concluded that more than one million children in Gaza require psychosocial support, and that 96 percent of them feel death is imminent. Among adolescents and young adults, roughly 61 percent are said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, 38 percent from depression and 41 percent from anxiety. One study estimated that approximately 88 percent of adults in the territory display symptoms of PTSD.

These figures did not emerge in isolation. The author notes that Gaza's population had already been traumatised by repeated wars long before the current conflict began. By 2020, following three month-long wars, half of the territory's children were already displaying symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. By 2022, 71 percent of adults were reported to be suffering from depression. The cumulative effect of these successive conflicts has left an entire population psychologically shattered, with each new round of violence compounding wounds that had never properly healed.

What the statistics fail to capture, the author argues, is what it actually feels like to live with such trauma when the possibility of recovery is not even visible on the horizon. He describes the current war as fundamentally different from anything that came before, distinguishing it from previous conflicts in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, when residents fled their homes, took cover from bombardment and witnessed homes being levelled. Those earlier wars, however terrible, were bounded by time and eventually gave way to periods of uneasy quiet.

Total, never-ending war, by contrast, overwhelms and crushes its victims because it eliminates any hope of survival, the author writes. This distinction between episodic conflict and continuous, open-ended destruction is central to his account, suggesting that the psychological mechanisms that might ordinarily help people endure and eventually recover from wartime trauma have been systematically destroyed by the sheer relentlessness of the current campaign.

The author also reflects on how the reality of death in Gaza defies the literary depictions of war he had encountered in books, citing Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" as an example of the classic war prose that shaped his expectations. He notes that he had read detailed descriptions of shelling and gunfire, of mangled limbs, of dead bodies carried away on stretchers, and of doctors covered in blood likened to butchers. None of it, he insists, prepared him for what he has witnessed.

In Gaza, death has a distinct smell, he writes, composed of gunpowder, burning rubble and something rotten. It has a sound: the whoosh of an incoming missile followed by muffled screams from beneath collapsed buildings. It has a bodily sensation of pure terror. These sensory dimensions of the experience, absent from even the most graphic literature, illustrate how far removed the author's daily reality is from any conventional understanding of warfare.

The account details the author's personal experiences during the first two months of the war alone. Six houses in his immediate neighbourhood were bombed, and 60 of his neighbours were killed. One bomb landed so close that it burst through the wall and windows of his own home, injuring his younger sister, his mother and himself. Throughout that period, bombing was incessant, continuing day and night without pause.

During daylight hours, smoke filled the air and obscured the blue of the sky. At night, the darkness and dust were pierced only by phone torches as residents rushed to dig their neighbours out from beneath the rubble. The author recalls seeing a child's body lodged in a shattered wall beside a man's severed hand. He describes lifting the corpse of a baby from the ruins and watching a mother emerge from beneath a collapsed home, blood streaming down her cheeks, while smoke-blackened faces screamed and terrified neighbours searched through pulverised concrete for their families.

One episode stands out with particular cruelty. On what he calls a horrific day, the author found his own eight-year-old student, Mohammed, face down in the rubble. He rolled the boy onto his back to check for a pulse but found none, nor any breath. Mohammed had been coming to the author's house for English lessons with his sister. The bombing took his life but spared his sister, whom the author pulled out alive. The anecdote encapsulates the arbitrary nature of the violence, in which one child dies and a sibling survives within the same household.

The author describes his own trauma as lodged in his body like shrapnel. It tightens his chest when a drone passes overhead and shakes his hands when he hears gunfire crack nearby. He reports feeling numb, unable to concentrate and almost never smiling. He quotes Hemingway's observation that the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places, but that those which will not break it kills, taking the very good, the very gentle and the very brave impartially.

That line resonates deeply, the author explains, because beyond the trauma itself lies a crushing survivor's guilt. The finest and most noble people have been taken from the community, he writes. He has lost relatives, friends and students, describing them as the brightest, the most generous and the kindest among those he knew. This sense of having outlived the best people around him adds a moral and emotional dimension to the suffering that no clinical diagnosis can fully capture.

In an attempt to cope, the author says he no longer reads to learn or enrich himself but reads instead to forget, continuing until his vision blurs and sleep overtakes him, trying to keep images of death out of his mind. Fiction, he notes, can no longer move or shock him. He states that he has witnessed humanity die while the rest of the world watched on indifferently, and asks what could possibly be more fictional than that. The article concludes with a standard disclaimer noting that the views expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.