When Israeli missiles started landing in Gaza in early August, shattering glass and collapsing buildings, Jouman Abdu put on headphones, covered her eyes with a blindfold and stretched on the couch.
The eight-year-old Palestinian girl said she came up with this ritual to escape the bang of the blasts, the second round of steady violence she had experienced in 15 months.
“I didn’t want to hear the sounds of explosions,” she told Reuters as she sat with her mother. “I was afraid they would bomb our house.”
The latest outbreak of hostilities lasted only a weekend but buttressed the trauma faced by Palestinian children growing up in the densely populated strip in the years since 2007 when Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade, cutting it off from outside, four people, including parents and experts, told Reuters.
“If you are a child in or around Gaza and you are 15-years-old, in your life you have already gone through five different conflicts,” said Lucia Elmi, special representative of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, in Palestine.
“If you are a child in or around Gaza and you are 15-years-old, in your life you have already gone through five different conflicts.”
– Lucia Elmi, special representative of UNICEF.
Read the article by Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Henriette Chacar in Sight Magazine.