In Gaza, the dismay of a psychologist faced with a population exhausted by Israeli bombings

2024-03-18T00:06:14.148Z

Highlights: In the Gaza Strip, the hope of a truce is mixed with the fear of a major operation in Rafah. The population, which is also experiencing a serious humanitarian crisis, is exhausted. A psychologist who lives in the enclave has lost his home and survives, like the rest of the population, in deep distress. “You lock people in a small space and forbid them from having food and drink, it’s catastrophic,” says the psychologist, Mohamed Hafez al-Sharif.

In the Gaza Strip, the hope of a truce is mixed with the fear of a major operation in Rafah. The population, which is also experiencing a serious humanitarian crisis, is exhausted. A psychologist who lives…

TESTIMONY

In Gaza, the dismay of a psychologist faced with a population exhausted by Israeli bombings

In the Gaza Strip, the hope of a truce is mixed with the fear of a major operation in Rafah.

The population, which is also experiencing a serious humanitarian crisis, is exhausted.

A psychologist who lives in the enclave has lost his home and survives, like the rest of the population, in deep distress.

Palestinians mourn the death of their loved ones killed in Israeli bombings in front of the morgue of Al-Chifa hospital, in Gaza City on March 15, 2024. © AFP

By: RFI Follow

With our special correspondent in Jerusalem,

Murielle Paradon

Mohamed Hafez al-Sharif lives in the northern Gaza Strip.

After more than five months of war, this psychologist says he is exhausted.

No human, he says, can bear the current situation.

“

You lock people in a small space and forbid them from having food and drink, it’s catastrophic,”

he notes.

There's also how you feel when you lose a family member.
Seeing violence every day and mass destruction... All of that affects us morally.
If we cannot resolve these psychological problems, mental illnesses will explode.

This is not the first war we have suffered in Gaza, he continues.

But the accumulation of violence will leave its mark.

And the psychologist feels helpless: “

First, I try to help those around me, my family.
But a lot of children contact me, families call me, because they are not doing well psychologically.
They have seen too much violence.
Unfortunately, we can't do anything, we can't help them.

The psychological center in which Mohamed Hafez al-Sharif worked in Gaza was destroyed in a bombing.

There is no place to accommodate the population in distress.

Also read: Gaza, the population, exhausted, “at the mercy of crooks who monopolize food aid”

In Gaza, the dismay of a psychologist faced with a population exhausted by Israeli bombings

In Gaza, the dismay of a psychologist faced with a population exhausted by Israeli bombings

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