Every morning, Sama Tabeel takes out a piece of a mirror. She closes her eyes and prays: Please, please, let my hair have grown back again.
The eight-year-old lives in a tent camp for Palestinian refugees west of Khan Yunis. In June, shortly after the hospital where her family sought shelter was hit in an Israeli air raid, almost all of her hair suddenly fell out. The doctors explain it as acute stress caused by extreme fear.
I wish I could have a ponytail again and that I could brush my hair, says Sama Tabeel to Canadian RCI.
Four months later, she is still scared, according to her mother Fattah Tabeel. Constant gunfire, sirens, and air raids make the trauma never heal. Ahead of her ninth birthday on October 5, the daughter screamed that she wanted to die, the mother recounts: "it's soon my birthday and I have no hair".
Become Aggressive
Sama Tabeel is one of hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza living with symptoms of severe trauma. Months of violence, flight, starvation, and disease have inflicted extensive psychological damage on the children in Gaza, as stated by Save the Children in a report in March. The children are constantly afraid, have difficulty sleeping and eating, have anxiety and wet themselves. They have difficulty seeing a future, change their behavior patterns, become overly vigilant or clingy out of fear of losing their parents.
"They have become aggressive towards each other and scream. Their games are war games now – they imitate the sounds of bombs and explosions. They scream loudly – or they don't talk at all", says a mother called Amal about her children in the report.
"My son has stopped eating out of fear and has become so thin. He constantly asks me, 'dad, are we going to die?'. There is nothing I can do to help the children", says a father.
"No Joy"
The children in Gaza have not been able to attend school at all since the war broke out, states Unicef's Jonathan Crickx in an interview with AFP. Nearly 90 percent of all school buildings lie in ruins, according to the UN agency.
You see children who are not allowed to live a normal childhood: no education, no play, no joy.
Crickx tells about a meeting with ten-year-old Ahmad, whose uncle was killed in the war.
Ahmad told things that a ten-year-old shouldn't know: how the body was torn apart, how the head lay far away. These are things that are extremely strong and difficult to hear from a ten-year-old child, he says.
Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israel and the war broke out, at least 11,300 children in Gaza have been killed, according to the health department in the Hamas-controlled strip. Thousands more children are missing.
Around 17,000 children are reported to have lost or been separated from their parents.
346,000 children under the age of five are in need of nutritional supplements that the body needs to maintain its physiological functions. Around 50,000 children are estimated to need treatment for acute malnutrition in 2024.
Nearly 90 percent of all school buildings and educational institutions have been completely or partially destroyed in Israeli attacks. The remaining have almost exclusively been converted into temporary shelters for displaced Palestinians. As of October 2024, 645,000 children of school age have missed an entire school year.
Around one million children in Gaza are estimated to be in need of psychiatric care and psychosocial interventions due to the war.
Facts: Unicef, Global Nutrition Cluster, Ocha, Gaza's health department, Global Education Cluster
