For children of Gaza, trauma can be worse than war itself

For many children in Gaza, war is all they know.“In the past six years, three wars happened in Gaza,” Rifat Kassis, director of Defence for Children International told CNN’s Hala Gorani, in for Christiane Amanpour, on Tuesday. “So we are talking about a generation who only experienced war and violence.”And there are a lot of children in Gaza – about 43% of the population is under the age of twelve. The United Nations says that more than two hundred children have been killed in this conflict, now three weeks old.“When there is no place in Gaza where you can feel secure, when you lose your parents or one of your parents – this loss of the protection, this loss, the separation feeling from your parents, this is actually worse than the war activity itself,” Kassis said.UNICEF says that about 200,000 children “are in need of immediate psychosocial support.”“Most of these children, they will live up with depression, anxiety, hopelessness, grief, resentments, anger and fear,” Kassis said.“My biggest fear [is that] these children will live up with hatred, with violence, with all these feelings, which should not continue, it should not last, it should be treated. And this is where we are calling upon all international organizations that such a trauma needs to be dealt with immediately.”(CNN)Bakudaily.az