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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 8-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.
At least 49 people, including 17 children, were killed and more than 360 people, among them 151 children and teenagers, were wounded, Gaza health officials said, before an Egyptian-brokered truce halted the fighting.
Children make up about half of Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinian population.
There are no safe shelters in the strip, where Palestinian officials and international humanitarian organisations have warned that the healthcare system is on the brink of collapse.
A report in June by the aid group Save the Children found the psychosocial wellbeing of children in Gaza was at "alarmingly low levels" based on a survey of 488 children and 160 parents and caregivers. One in two children in Gaza is in need of mental health and psychosocial support, Elmi said.
Source: Reuters
