After an intense bombardment struck near his home, five-year-old Jad Zohud suddenly lost his ability to speak.
He is not alone. Across Gaza, specialists are reporting a rising number of children who can no longer speak following war-related injuries or psychological trauma.
For some, the cause is physical – head injuries, neurological damage or blast trauma. For others, there is no visible wound. Their silence follows repeated exposure to violence that overwhelms their ability to process or communicate.
Child psychotherapist Katrin Glatz Brubakk, who has worked in Gaza twice with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, describes it as “silent suffering” often hidden beneath the scale of the destruction.
Enough accumulated trauma at that age to prevent them from speaking is just… indescribably awful. Fucking hell.
This reminds me of another really sad newsstory I saw on Australian refugee children living in the mass refugee camp on Nauru about a condition called Resignation Syndrome. This sounds very similar to it, unfortunately.
Without hope the people perish.
Goddammit fuck Israel and all Israelis that are OK with their government!!
If you’re American like I am get with me in obstructing our government. This is more than monstrous, there are no words to describe the true terror and malice at work here. We should be tearing our politicians out of their comfortable beds and forcing them to sign divestments from Israel.
I am not American, but I am doing what I can to stop your government too.
