Palestinians have begun streaming out of Rafah ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack on the southern city that hosts some 1.5mn displaced Gazans.
Palestinians have begun streaming out of Rafah ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack on the southern city that hosts some 1.5mn displaced Gazans.
The children with missing limbs will remind the entire population what took place in 2023-24 for decades. The ones with diminished mental capacity from malnutrition will be blowing themselves up at the command of Hamas or whatever replaces Hamas. The aftermath will be broadcasted far and wide for a long time to come too. A lot of people are currently swallowing what’s happening as a side effect of war. The bombs will stop falling but the disfigured people will remain and the world would see them without the fog of war around them. I have a feeling what’s gonna be coming out over the years will have an effect somewhat similar to that of the Holocaust. It will be current, high definition and incessant.
Not to minimize malnutrition - that’s an effect that we know will be carried epigenetically for at least two generations even if everything stopped now and we weren’t looking forward to a decade-plus of occupation - but the situation on the whole is physically rewriting the brains of both the adults and more especially the children.
I am an adult, and I chose, more or less, to put myself into the situations I ended up in. I still have PTSD to the point that I had a flashback and panic attack in a friend’s bathroom during lunar new year when they set off a brick of firecrackers and it sounded exactly like a half dozen automatic weapons firing from across the intersection. It took me about 15 minutes of breathing exercises and pushing everything back down before I could come back out. What I went through was absolutely zero compared to what these people, including children, are going through. You’re going to have everything from suicides to psychoses to radicalization and hair trigger political violence. And it’s baked in at this point. It’s done. It’s going to happen with all of the physical certainty of billiard balls hitting each other. All they can do is make it worse, which is what they’re doing every day.
There’s going to be decades of consequences, and Israel is going to find itself isolated far more than it has ever been.
Forward and backward. Gazans have been suffering of malnutrition since 2006.