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Children in Gaza learn to breathe deeply to ease trauma: Goats and Soda: NPR

Teenager Sama Ahel was taught how to breathe deeply in response to the Gaza-Israel conflict in May.

Fatima Shbair for NPR


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Fatima Shbair for NPR


Teenager Sama Ahel was taught how to breathe deeply in response to the Gaza-Israel conflict in May.

Fatima Shbair for NPR

GAZA CITY – When Israeli rockets landed at the foot of her building during the Hamas-Israel conflict in May of this year, shooting shards of glass from surrounding apartments into the room where she was hanging out with her family. family, 15 years old Sama Ahel did what any other teenager could do. She took out her phone and started film.

The video lasted about seven minutes. You see her in stockings, running down dark stairs and across a gravel-strewn street. You see a burned car overturned and on fire in front of the Hamas government office on the ground floor, and her 17-year-old sister Tasneem covered his bloody face with his hijab.

You hear Sama’s rapid explosions and screams as she crouched with her family behind a metal trash can next to a United Nations complex across from her apartment building. A screaming ambulance arrives at them, and her father, a psychologist, asks her to stop filming, fearing Israel might pick up on cell phone signals and target them.

What is not recording on video Ismael Ahel did next. He led his family in a deep breathing exercise. The idea, he says, is to get yourself out of the shock and into the present, making yourself realize that the traumatic event is over.

“You just close your eyes and start breathing in,” Sama, 16, demonstrates. She took a deep breath and held her breath for a moment. “You’ll start to feel it going through you.”

Her entire apartment complex needs help.

A week after the war, Ahel and a team of therapists went to all 120 apartments in the building to call home. They refer some to therapy. For others, they teach deep breathing and other coping mechanisms, like shaking hands and feet, to relieve stress.

“We have a hard time treating it,” Gazans, Ahel said, sitting on the couch at home. “We can’t just deal with the first injury or the second injury. It’s the complexities of trauma together.”

One of the buildings in Gaza City was bombed during the war in May.

Fatima Shbair for NPR


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Fatima Shbair for NPR


One of the buildings in Gaza City was bombed during the war in May.

Fatima Shbair for NPR

The 11-day conflict in May left both Palestinians and Israelis vulnerable. But in the tiny Gaza Strip, where the Palestinians face heavy bombardment without a bomb shelter and missile defense system to protect the Israelis, the psychological trauma is deep.

Ahel and his colleagues diagnose it as “Gaza trauma”

It is an accumulation of trauma from four punitive wars over the past decade and a half, wars between Gaza’s Hamas rulers and their enemy Israel.

Matthias Schmale, who ended his term as director of UNRWA in Gaza, the agency that provides food, health care and learning in Gaza this summer, said this summer: “I assert that the greatest damage occurred in May is psychological.

About half of Gaza’s two million residents are under the age of 18, and over the past six months many have received mass therapy. UN put 150,000 children through counseling and summer activities.

“If you look objectively at the numbers, the number of people killed, the buildings destroyed, etc., this might not be as heavy as it was in 2014,” he said. [war]. But I don’t meet any Palestinians who don’t describe this as worse, and that’s related to the heaviness [of the Israeli strikes] and psychological impact,” says Schmale.

Some children after the war suffered from knee and ankle pain and difficulty walking. NS Gaza Community Mental Health Program, a local clinic supported by European donors, diagnoses it’s trauma and introduces them to traditional folk practitioners who perform an olive oil body massage called gata’at il-khofa, Arabic for “cutting fear.”

A mental health worker in Gaza walks with one of the children participating in a psychiatric session to help children cope with the trauma of war.

Fatima Shbair for NPR


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Fatima Shbair for NPR


A mental health worker in Gaza walks with one of the children participating in a psychiatric session to help children cope with the trauma of war.

Fatima Shbair for NPR

Psychologist Yasser Abu Jamei, who directs the mental health organization, says it improves “blood circulation, lymphatic circulation and stops some of that pain”.

Children who do not communicate or cooperate

The mental health clinic still hosts group psychiatry seminars, which Abu Jamei says is a cost-effective way to treat multiple children at once.

“Ooooo! Oooooh!” Psychologist Aida Kassab howls, knocking open window blinds to simulate a storm, as children gather in a plastic playhouse for a group psychology session. Kassab wants children to learn to seek love and protection from others when their home feels threatened. The children in the session barely talked to each other.

“Those kids go to the same school and the same neighborhood. But there’s no communication between them. There’s no cooperation, there’s no teamwork,” Kassab said. “They have behavioral disturbances and trauma.”

Psychologist Aida Kassab leads children through a psychotherapy session to help them cope with the trauma of the Gaza-Israel conflict.

Fatima Shbair for NPR


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Fatima Shbair for NPR


Psychologist Aida Kassab leads children through a psychotherapy session to help them cope with the trauma of the Gaza-Israel conflict.

Fatima Shbair for NPR

Helping traumatized families find their ‘strengths’

It’s hard to treat trauma in Gaza, where people don’t feel the real war is behind them. Israel and Hamas are still negotiating the terms of a ceasefire and most of the destroyed houses have yet to be rebuilt.

Abu Jamei offers advice to parents. “Sometimes the best thing you can do for your family is to get them to identify the strengths in their lives,” he says. “You know, the strength may be that you survive. The strength may be that your house is still there. The strength may be that your school is good.”

Yasser Abu Jamei, a psychologist, is the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. He tells parents, “Sometimes the best thing you can do for your family is get them to identify their strengths.”

Fatima Shbair for NPR


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Fatima Shbair for NPR


Yasser Abu Jamei, a psychologist, is the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. He tells parents, “Sometimes the best thing you can do for your family is get them to identify their strengths.”

Fatima Shbair for NPR

The Ahel family has those strengths: They survived an attack near their building. Their home is still there. Tasneem graduated with high scores on the matriculation exam shortly after the war and was seeking a scholarship to study medicine abroad. Sama is back at school.

But Sama finds it very difficult to move on. Friends continued to comment on her video of the attack that she posted on Facebook, and every other day, she came back and watched those seven horrifying minutes. Her father said that their apartment building is currently leaning several degrees. At school, when she looks out the window, she sees a bombed building.

However, before doing an assignment or a test, Sama still sits in a comfortable chair, puts her hands on her legs, closes her eyes, takes 5 or 6 deep breaths and visualizes.

She paints the Mediterranean Sea. Or Capital Mall, a shopping center with a busy food court. Or her friend Yasmine’s house. Or the Qattan Children’s Library, her second home.

She has some happy places she can go to in mind.

Fatima Shbair contributed to this story from Gaza City.

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