cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35235455
“I wasn’t like this before the war,” Mohammed says, almost to himself. “I don’t laugh the way I used to. Even my face, when I smile… it’s not the same.”
He speaks without calculation, as though trying to name an ailment no textbook can diagnose. It’s as if he’s mourning someone he lost along the way, only that someone is himself. Mohammed didn’t just lose a home. Like so many, he lost the gentle layers that once made him whole. The spark behind the eyes, the ease of laughter, the unspoken rhythms of personality that war has since unraveled.
This is a war that takes place in silence, inward, invisible, brutal. It is the undoing of children who no longer know how to play, of women whose grief has no way of being processed, of men who tremble without sound. It is a generation swallowing its screams, walking through days with faces that no longer feel like their own. How does war do this? How does an external storm become an internal quake, redrawing the contours of who we are?
In Gaza today, many live estranged from themselves. “It’s like I’ve become someone else” is a sentence heard everywhere; in midnight conversations, text messages, side glances, and the language of eyes too tired to speak. But the transformation is etched deeply: in hollowed-out stares, laughter too heavy for the face it rises from.
At a displacement center in western Gaza, I sit on an overturned paint bucket beside Saleh. His face is buried in his hands. Without lifting his head, the man in his thirties confesses that he’s been searching for his old, jubilant self. Before the war, he was the group’s jester, quick-witted and effortless with jokes, turning daily life into comedy. On summer nights, he’d perform impromptu stand-up under the stars.
His mother, overhearing us, joins in with a tray of bitter tea. “You see him now?” she says, her voice thin. “This boy used to be like a flower. He’d make you laugh from the heart. Now he’s like a shadow.” He rarely leaves the tent. The man who once loved debate no longer listens to the news. He avoids conversation. He is shrinking.
Mental health reports reveal the descent: a sharp rise in depression, breakdowns, and acute psychological stress. A 2025 EMHJ study found that 99.5% of displaced Gazans live with depression, 99.7% with anxiety, and 93.7% with trauma symptoms so intense they disturb daily life. Even those who escaped are not untouched. Out of 383 adults who fled to Egypt between October 2023 and May 2024, nearly all were diagnosed with depression, half in its severest form. Women bear the heavier weight.
But at the heart of this rupture are the children. UNICEF and WHO warned early that nearly one million Gazan children would need urgent psychological support. Hospital data shows 90% of them display signs of accute anxiety, while 82% believe they could die at any moment. A recent New Yorker piece put it starkly: PTSD doesn’t apply here, because there is no post. This is trauma without an end.
Writer and blogger Fidaa Ziyad has spent the war collecting women’s stories of grief. In small circles of trust, women begin to slowly open up. One mother told her she was grateful it was her younger son who died and not the eldest, because without him, no one would feed her.
In one session, a mirror was passed around with a question: Who were you before the loss? Who are you now? Some refused to look. Others stared and whispered: “Who is this woman? I don’t know her.”
Of twenty women who lost their husbands, five said they felt shattered, weak, adrift. Another five said they’d grown stronger and fiercer. But the mothers who lost children spoke with a different kind of silence. One said: “His soul was like a feather. It was snatched before I could even hold it.”
The war has not allowed these women to pause. They are forced to carry on because they can’t afford to process what happened to them. And still, the changes show in the tension of their jaws, in voices that harden or break, in the pitch-dark circles around their eyes.
Mohammed Hajji, who leads a psychosocial support initiative, says the trauma is no longer acute; it is chronic. The damage is deep, threading through children and caregivers alike. “We see nightmares, panic at the sound of aircraft, stunted emotional and psychological development,” he says. “Even in the food lines, aggression or withdrawal are now survival instincts.” Learning, memory, and focus wither. But the greatest wound is harder to name: “Children who no longer feel wonder,” he says. “As if life itself has been emptied of meaning.”
This collapse unfolds while Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital lies in ruins, leaving over 450,000 people without inpatient care, including 100,000 in critical mental conditions.
Behind those numbers are lives quietly breaking: A mother who forgets she was cooking and burns the food. A father who hasn’t left his tent in weeks. A child afraid to sleep because “the planes come back in my dreams.”
Civil society groups have stepped up to fill the void, building fragile spaces of healing: mobile therapy teams, group sessions, storytelling workshops, play therapy for children. But these efforts take place in tents, under crumbling ceilings, and often from those wounded themselves. “The facilitator is broken too,” someone told me. “But we try to be a pillar.”
International organizations like UNICEF, Save the Children, MSF, CRS offer help, but most of these programs are short-term and operate as emotional triage. Some displacement camps get a therapist visit twice a week. Others, not even once in months.
The reasons vary: closed crossings, bombed infrastructure, vanishing funds, and a global preference for what is fast and visible over what is slow and internal.
But those working on the ground are warning: psychological wounds this deep cannot be bandaged with seasonal fixes. A mental earthquake of this scale demands long-term commitment, not just slogans.
People sift through rubble, not only for belongings or remains of loved ones, but for fragments of the people they used to be. When and if the war ends, will the healing begin? Will therapy and aid be enough to restore these faces, these selves? Or must we all learn to live as strangers in our own skin
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