Bethlehem, occupied West Financial institution – Within the slender alleyways of the Dheisheh refugee camp, three kids debate which of their encounters with the Israeli navy is price telling, and who will get to inform it.
Yanal, 14, wins the opening spherical on language expertise alone. He speaks three languages: Arabic, English and Spanish, and insists on telling his story in English.
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“Life within the camp is complicated,” he says, as a result of, as he explains, there may be nowhere to run away to when the military comes.
Yanal retains returning to at least one reminiscence: a soccer match, troopers getting into the sphere, and there being no means out.
Mustafa Abu Aliyah, 13, counters with a raid that he bumped into as he was on his technique to his grandfather’s home. The Israeli military fired stay rounds and tear fuel, he says. “We have been in the course of the fireplace.”
He can’t keep in mind his first encounter with troopers, “however I positively noticed them once I was little, as a result of they’re at all times coming right here”.
His sister Diyar, 12, was mid-piano lesson the final time the military got here by way of.
“Each time the military comes, there will likely be tear fuel,” she says. “Folks will likely be crushed. There’s normally somebody injured or killed.”
She compares it to life elsewhere. “I see kids in different nations, in different worlds, dwelling in security, however we will’t even go away our entrance door with out struggling.”
The raids occur so typically that the kids typically can’t keep in mind the dates of particular incidents. However what they do keep in mind is the concern they skilled and the aggression displayed by the Israeli troopers.
Within the first 9 months of 2025 alone, Israeli forces carried out almost 7,500 raids throughout the occupied West Financial institution, or about 27 a day, and a 37 p.c improve in contrast with the identical interval in 2024.
‘Essence of childhood destroyed’
The youngsters within the Dheisheh refugee camp replicate a wider sample of childhood experiences underneath Israeli occupation, set out in a report the UN’s Unbiased Worldwide Fee of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory launched on Tuesday.
It examines Israel’s remedy of Palestinian kids in Gaza and the occupied West Financial institution since October 2023.
Titled, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”, it discovered that Israeli forces have killed a minimum of 20,179 Palestinian kids and wounded greater than 44,000 throughout the occupied territory, most of them in Gaza – the place it mentioned that the deliberate concentrating on of kids constituted a part of the genocide within the Palestinian territory.
The report additionally paperwork a sample of killings, mass arrests, torture, sexual violence and assaults on faculties and hospitals.
Within the West Financial institution, it data a pointy rise in settler violence towards kids and killings by Israeli forces, amongst them a two-year-old woman shot lifeless in January 2025. Youngsters, the report notes, are held in Israeli detention, with no lawyer and no phrase despatched to their dad and mom, a separation it says can quantity to enforced disappearance. Faculties, too, are targets: 85 throughout the West Financial institution are underneath demolition or stop-work orders, and others have been closed or attacked by troopers and settlers.
Past the casualty rely
The UN fee argues that Israel has created situations through which Palestinians stay in a continuing state of “subtle, ambient terror, that doesn’t require fixed bombing to stay efficient”.
“We’re speaking about repeated shocks, about steady occasions that by no means finish,” says Lemis Farraj, a psychologist and the challenge coordinator at Shorouq in Dheisheh, emphasising {that a} baby’s bodily and psychological well being can’t be separated from one another.
The report calls this steady traumatic stress, distinct from Submit-Traumatic Stress Dysfunction (PTSD), as a result of there isn’t a single occasion to recuperate from. The hazard doesn’t simply come from experiencing one raid, however from the concern that comes with ready for the anticipated raids that can possible come sooner or later.
Diyar explains that when the military enters her neighbourhood, she has to remain residence and wait, it doesn’t matter what her plans have been. “Our life stops,” she says.
Her brother, Mustafa, says that the repetition has worn the concern flat.
“Once I see the military, I [am] used to it and I cease being afraid.”
Farraj sees the identical within the younger kids she treats: a startle at an extraordinary sound, certainty {that a} raid has begun, and regression – expertise already discovered out of the blue misplaced once more.
5-year-old Khour Hammad, who lives just a few alleys away from the older kids, has skilled the identical raids.
She explains that each of her dad and mom are in jail. Israeli forces arrested her father in July 2023 and her mom final March, in keeping with the household.
Khour remembers the night time the military got here for her mom. Half-asleep, she heard a person’s voice and thought her father had lastly come residence. She climbed off the bed anticipating him. As an alternative, she discovered troopers inside the home.
The troopers tried to query Khour. She says that she “felt like I used to be going to throw up”.
Handed an outdated household picture, she brightens without delay, stating her mom, Islam Amarna, and her father, Osama Hammad, and rattling off recollections in bursts.
Generational trauma
Whereas Palestinian kids in Gaza and the West Financial institution face completely different lived experiences, the UN finds the identical trigger behind the hurt: a navy occupation described as a “long-term mechanism of domination, subjugation and oppression”.
Farraj provides that kids are affected not solely by their very own experiences of trauma, but additionally by what’s handed down from dad and mom and grandparents.
“The primary technology of the Nakba lived in shock and handed it on to their kids,” she says, referring to the ethnic cleaning of a minimum of 750,000 Palestinians following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.
The report equally notes that Palestinian refugees, now of their fifth technology, have internalised a way of “dispossession from the Nakba” alongside present-day experiences of occupation.
Within the West Financial institution, roughly one in 4 Palestinians are refugees; in Gaza, it’s about 70 p.c.
Israeli violence and forcible displacement have been carried by way of generations of Palestinians, compounding because the cycle repeats. Farraj says trauma restoration is dependent upon stability: household assist, education, protected areas and a predictable routine, all of which stay precarious underneath Israel’s occupation.
For Khour, that stability begins along with her dad and mom.
“I need the entire world to pay attention and see my image,” Khour says, “and get my mother and pa out of jail.”
