Three Years On: Gaza Survivors Describe a Trauma Too Deep to Heal

Three years after the war in Gaza began, a Palestinian writer and teacher is offering a rare, first-person account of what it means to survive a conflict that has not truly ended. In an opinion piece published by Al Jazeera, Said Alsaloul describes a landscape where death and destruction have become so pervasive that the very idea of recovery has slipped out of reach. His account, drawn from personal experience, paints a picture of a population living in what he calls permanent trauma — a condition that cannot begin to heal because the violence that caused it continues.

According to the article, the death toll has surpassed 74,000 people, a figure that includes more than 1,400 killed since a so-called "ceasefire" took effect in October of the previous year. Alsaloul notes that countless others have died from preventable causes, a consequence of a collapsed healthcare system that has left hospitals without basic supplies, staff and infrastructure. Health officials and international bodies have repeatedly warned that the true toll is likely far higher, with many victims still buried under rubble or unrecorded because civil records have been destroyed.

Beyond the dead, the article argues, is a population of survivors whose psychological wounds are almost impossible to quantify. Alsaloul points to data compiled by international organizations that have begun describing the situation as a mental health crisis of historic proportions. The United Nations Population Fund has concluded that more than one million children in Gaza require psychosocial support, and that 96 percent of them believe death is imminent — a statistic that suggests a generation growing up without any sense of a future.

The numbers grow more alarming when adolescents and young adults are considered. According to figures cited in the article, roughly 61 percent of young people in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, 38 percent from depression and 41 percent from anxiety. Among adults, one study estimated that some 88 percent exhibit symptoms of PTSD. These figures are not isolated to the current war: Alsaloul notes that by 2020, after three earlier major conflicts, half of Gaza's children already showed signs of PTSD, and by 2022, 71 percent of adults reported depression.

What these statistics fail to capture, the writer argues, is the lived reality of trauma when there is no realistic prospect of safety. He draws a distinction between the wars he had experienced before — in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021 — and what he describes as a total, genocidal war that has crushed any hope of survival. Previous conflicts, however devastating, eventually gave way to ceasefires and periods of rebuilding. This time, he writes, the bombing has been so relentless and the destruction so complete that the usual cycle of recovery has been broken.

Alsaloul describes how literature failed to prepare him for what he witnessed. He recalls reading Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" and its depictions of shelling, wounds and death, but says the reality in Gaza is utterly different. Death there, he writes, has a smell — gunpowder, burning rubble, decay. It has a sound — the whoosh of a missile and muffled screams from beneath collapsed buildings. It has a physical sensation of pure terror. The war prose he had studied, he says, was gentle by comparison.

His personal account includes the bombing of six houses in his immediate neighborhood during the first two months of the war, which killed 60 of his neighbors. One strike came so close that it burst through a wall and shattered the windows of his family home, injuring his younger sister, his mother and himself. The bombardment, he recalls, was incessant, filling the days with smoke that blotted out the sky and the nights with the glow of phone torches as neighbors dug through rubble in search of the dead and the living.

Among the scenes he describes are a child's body lodged in a shattered wall beside a man's severed hand, and the corpse of a baby he helped lift from ruins. He also recounts watching a mother emerge from a collapsed home with blood streaming down her face while smoke-covered neighbors clawed through pulverized concrete looking for relatives. In one of the most painful passages, he writes of finding Mohammed, an eight-year-old student who had come to his home for English lessons, face down in the rubble. He rolled the boy over to check for a pulse but found none. The bombing spared Mohammed's sister, whom Alsaloul pulled from the debris alive.

The psychological burden, he explains, is compounded by survivor's guilt. He has lost relatives, friends and students — people he describes as the brightest and kindest among them. The trauma manifests physically: his chest tightens when a drone passes overhead, his hands shake at the sound of gunfire, he feels numb and cannot concentrate, and he almost never smiles. He quotes Hemingway's observation that the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places, but that those who will not break are killed — the very good, the very gentle and the very brave, impartially.

Reading, once a source of enrichment and learning, has become a means of escape. He reads to forget, until his vision blurs and sleep takes over, trying to keep images of death at bay. Fiction no longer moves or shocks him, he writes, because he has witnessed humanity die while the rest of the world looked on with indifference. What could be more fictional than that, he asks.

The article closes with a disclaimer noting that the views expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance. But the testimony it contains aligns with warnings from humanitarian organizations, mental health professionals and United Nations agencies that have repeatedly called for unrestricted access to psychological support and medical care in Gaza. Experts caution that without a lasting halt to hostilities and a massive scale-up of mental health services, the long-term consequences for Gaza's population — particularly its children — could persist for generations, shaping not only individual lives but the social fabric of an entire society.