Rasha Abou Jalal
The New Arab / March 30, 2026
“We are not talking about individual cases of depression or anxiety; we are talking about an entire society living a continuous collective trauma.”
As evening falls in the Al-Awda camp for displaced people west of Gaza City, Khalil Abu Shaqfa begins searching for his mentally ill brother, Atta.
Carrying a small flashlight, he moves between the tents, asking passersby and children, “Have you seen Atta? Did he pass by here?”
His 46-year-old brother has schizophrenia and often flees the family’s tent whenever they lose sight of him for just a few minutes.
Khalil told The New Arab, as he sat in front of his tent surrounded by worn pieces of cloth, “We are not as afraid of people from him as we are afraid of him from himself. But sometimes he unintentionally hurts the people around him. He doesn’t know what he is doing; he lives in another world.”
Before Israel’s genocidal war, Atta used to receive treatment at Gaza’s psychiatric hospital, given a sedative injection every month, and doctors monitored his condition. He lived a relatively calm life, sometimes helping his brothers, sitting with children, and laughing a lot.
After Israeli forces destroyed the hospital, the medication was cut off, and his condition began to rapidly deteriorate.
A devastating blow
The destruction of the only psychiatric hospital in the Gaza Strip dealt a devastating blow to an already fragile mental health system.
This is the only facility that tackled severe cases and provided inpatient and specialised treatment services, which ceased service in the first weeks of the war after Israel bombed and destroyed its buildings.
The hospital, which had been established decades ago, represented the last refuge for patients suffering from severe disorders such as schizophrenia, psychosis, and major depression. It provided about 30 beds for cases that required continuous medical supervision and received thousands of patients annually before the war.
With its destruction, Gaza lost not only a medical facility but the only system capable of containing dangerous cases, at the same time that primary mental health care centres were also destroyed, and a severe shortage exceeding 70% of essential psychiatric medications emerged.
This collapse left patients without follow-up or treatment and forced their families to bear the burden of caring for them in displacement conditions. Now, many cases do not have any alternative for specialised mental health care inside the Strip.
“Since the medication stopped, he has changed completely. He became nervous, suddenly shouting, sometimes hitting anyone who passed by, even children. Not because he wants to hurt them, but because he thinks people are attacking him or talking about him. We always apologise to people and explain that he is sick,” Khalil Abu Shaqfa says about his ill brother.
Inside the tent, the family tries to keep Atta close, but it is not easy. He would suddenly run away, walk long distances between the tents of displaced people, and sometimes disappear for hours or even a full day.
“Once he disappeared for two full days. We thought he had died under the bombing. We found him in a distant camp sitting alone, laughing and talking to himself,” Abu Shaqfa recalled.
The biggest problem facing the family is the lack of medication and sedatives that Atta needs to control his episodes.
“We searched all the pharmacies, but there is no medicine. Even simple sedatives are not available. He used to take an injection every month at the hospital, and now there is no hospital at all. What should we do? We are not doctors,” Abu Shaqfa said.
“Sometimes we have to hold him by force when he has an agitation episode. Once, he tried to hit his head with an iron pole, and once, he ran after a child because he thought the child was insulting him. We live in constant fear that he might hurt someone or hurt himself,” he added.
With the absence of the psychiatric hospital, the family has turned into nurses and guards at the same time, watching over him day and night. One of his brothers sleeps next to him every night, so he does not run away.
“The war did not destroy houses only; it destroyed people’s minds too. My brother is one of those who were lost after the hospital was destroyed. He is not a dangerous madman; he is just a patient. But now he lives in the street and among tents without treatment, and this is the most dangerous thing,” Abu Shaqfa concluded.
‘A girl who loved life’
Maryam Shehda, 31, was not mentally ill before Israel’s war. She was, as her mother described, “a girl who loved life,” living with her husband and two children, a simple life, planning to expand their house and buy a new bedroom.
Her life stopped in November 2023, when she went to the market to buy some necessities. While she was away, an Israeli airstrike on the family home killed her husband and her two children.
“When she came back from the market, she did not find the house, only rubble. She kept screaming and searching for her children with her hands between the stones. Since that day, Maryam has not been the Maryam we knew,” her mother told TNA, while sitting inside a displacement tent and holding the edge of her dress.
In the first weeks after the incident, Maryam cried constantly; then, suddenly, she fell silent for long hours, staring at a single point in the void. After that, she developed severe depression, refused to eat or talk, and said she wanted to die to join her husband and children.
“Every day she tells me: Why did I survive? I should have died with them. She felt guilty because she went to the market and left them at home,” her mother said.
The family was unable to take Maryam to a psychiatrist. The war has almost destroyed the mental health sector; the psychiatric hospital is out of service, and there are no specialised clinics or available medications.
“We did not take her to a single psychiatrist, not because we don’t want to, but because there are no doctors and no psychiatric hospitals. No one asks about this type of patient now; everything in the health sector has collapsed,” the mother said.
A few days ago, Maryam attempted suicide for the first time.
“I left for a few minutes to get water, and when I came back, I found her trying to hang herself with a rope we tied the tent with. I screamed, ran to her, and saved her at the last moment. Since that day, I have never left her alone,” her mother recounted, tears falling from her eyes.
The family now lives in constant fear that Maryam may try to end her life again, so her mother has been forced to take harsh measures to protect her.
“I hide all the knives in the tent, and I don’t leave any rope near her. Sometimes when I feel she is very bad, I tie her hand to the bed so she does not hurt herself. I am a mother, and I know this is cruel, but what can I do? I want to protect her from death,” said the mother.
“Sometimes I hear my daughter talking and saying: ‘Wait for me, I will come soon.’ When I hear her say that, I feel that I will lose her at any moment,” she added.
One of the biggest psychological disasters
Dr Dardah al-Shaer, professor of social psychology at Gaza University, told TNA that the Gaza Strip is now experiencing one of the largest collective psychological disasters in modern history. He explained that the effects of the war are no longer limited to the dead and wounded but have extended to the psychological structure of society as a whole, especially children.
“We are not talking about individual cases of depression or anxiety; we are talking about an entire society living a continuous collective trauma, where people lost safety, home, family, work, and the future at the same time, and this leads to widespread psychological collapse,” he added.
Al-Shaer explained that studies conducted after the war showed shocking numbers, indicating that a very large proportion of the population suffers from symptoms of anxiety and depression, and that post-traumatic stress disorder rates are unprecedented, especially among children and displaced people.
One study indicates that about 67.8% of the population suffers from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. 79.3% suffer from anxiety and 84.5% from depression—extremely high rates compared to any other society in the world.
“Children are the most psychologically affected group by the war, because a child cannot interpret what is happening around them—bombing, killing, displacement, and loss of family—so many psychological and behavioural symptoms appear such as bedwetting, sudden silence, stuttering, nightmares, severe fear, and sometimes what is called psychogenic seizures or dissociation from reality,” al-Shaer noted.
“We also notice the spread of cases of silence or what is called catatonia among children who witnessed killings or lost their families, where the child stops talking and moving and becomes as if separated from the world. These cases used to require specialised psychological treatment inside the psychiatric hospital that was destroyed,” the doctor added.
He also pointed out that Israel’s war has led to dangerous social phenomena linked to mental health, such as domestic violence, addiction, and suicide attempts.
Terrifying levels
Hisham al-Mudalal, Director of Planning and Mental Health Development at the Ministry of Health, told TNA that “detailed figures indicate terrifying levels of psychological need in the Gaza Strip,” explaining that the scale of the psychological catastrophe has multiplied unprecedentedly since the outbreak of the war.
“Before the war, about 485,000 people had psychological disorders to varying degrees, but today it can be said that the entire society needs psychological support. There are about one million children in Gaza, meaning nearly all children in the Strip now need urgent psychological and social support due to repeated trauma from bombing, displacement, and loss of family members. This is a huge number that exceeds the capacity of any health system, let alone a collapsed one,” Al-Mudalal said.
He noted that the biggest challenge facing mental health services is the severe shortage of medications.
“The quantities of psychiatric medications entering Gaza cover no more than 10 per cent of the actual need, which means that about 90 per cent of essential psychiatric medications are unavailable,” he said. “This shortage does not only mean that patients are not receiving treatment, but it means we are facing a society living in gradual psychological collapse and a tearing of the collective psychological fabric, where people live in a constant state of nervous alert and endless fear.”
Al-Mudalal added that this war differs from previous wars because the trauma was not an event that ended, but a trauma that continues daily.
“In wars, trauma usually ends, and then the recovery phase begins, but in Gaza, the trauma continues every day; there is no safe place and no real stop to the bombing, and this deprives the brain of the chance to begin the recovery process. So we see severe psychological symptoms on a wide scale, especially among children,” he described.
Rasha Abou Jalal is an author and journalist from Gaza who covers political events and humanitarian issues
