"Home is everything. Everything—safety, comfort." Shamali Shamali, in The New Yorker - November 11, 2025

As Told To

In Gaza, Home Is Just a Memory

After the ceasefire, many Palestinians who were displaced during the war are still grieving the homes they can’t return to—and which they often had to evacuate in minutes.

 

By Mohammed R. Mhawish 

Illustration by Rama Duwaji

November 11, 2025

The New Yorker 

The United Nations estimates that at least 1.9 million people were displaced during the war. One of them is Shahd Shamali, who is twenty years old, and is currently living at a camp in Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip. For several weeks, we communicated via WhatsApp video calls. From my screen, I could see her sitting at a shared desk in a room, where others held their phones at chest height to catch the router’s range. When our calls dropped, as they often did, Shamali and I would switch over to text messages and voice notes...

Shamali Shamali: ".... Home

Home is everything. Everything—safety, comfort. No matter what happened during my day, I always knew I’d come back home.

There are eleven of us, in my family, and most of us lived in the apartment together. My siblings—Rawan, Dina, Rahaf, Hala, Jana, Reem, Ahmed—Mom, Dad. And then the most important member of our family, my cat, Lulu.

A typical day started with everyone gathering for breakfast. Regardless of whether one of us was sleepy or tired, we all had to eat breakfast together. After that, everyone would go off and start their days. Later, when we were back home, my little siblings and I would play music. Dad would be watching the TV. Mom and others would be using their cellphones. Still, we were all together. Being together, as a family, is very important to us.

My favorite place in our home was my room. Whenever my siblings and I felt upset, or when we wanted to escape our problems, we’d go in there and draw. We would hang the drawings on the wall. It was our safe place.... " READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/the-war-in-gaza-has-paused-but-home-is-still-gone

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"After three hundred days of war, the UNRWA issued an analysis describing Gaza’s trauma as “chronic and unrelenting”—a collective embodiment of continuous traumatic stress disorder (C.T.S.D.), a condition that stems from living under relentless trauma. Unlike post-traumatic stress disorder, which sets in after a difficult experience, C.T.S.D. is what occurs when there is no end in sight. Gazans have adapted to chronic danger, living in a state of hypervigilance, emotional numbness, and dissociation amid the slow erasure of any imagined future. The effect on children has been especially catastrophic. "

 The Lede

The New Yorker

Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma

In Gaza, where displaced children play a game called “air strike” and act out death, the lack of mental-health resources has become another emergency.

 

By Mohammed R. Mhawish

 

August 1, 2025

The line outside Dr. Bahzad al-Akhras’s clinic starts to assemble before sunrise, a ripple of bodies in the half-light standing barefoot or in frayed sandals, waiting for a turn at what now passes for care. His clinic is wherever it needs to be: in a corner at a shelter compound, on the move during a walk around the yard, or behind the makeshift screen of a bedsheet pulled between two poles, if the wind allows. Often, Akhras sees patients in a tented space, tucked among hundreds of other such tents in the dense sprawl of Al-Mawasi, in the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

Akhras, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, lost his home to an Israeli strike, in early 2024. He and his family have been displaced multiple times, living in tents where the canvas sweats from too many bodies pressed into too little space. He no longer sits in a white-walled office or wears a badge. But he continues to work, seeing some fifty patients a day, most of them children. One of his regular patients is a young girl, no older than fourteen, who survived a strike that killed her entire family. She woke up in an I.C.U., alone, unable to understand where everyone had gone. Now she sits in front of Akhras in silence, until she asks, again and again, if he can bring them back. He has no answer, only a pencil stub and a coloring book, which he hopes she can use to express and process her emotions... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/treating-gazas-collective-trauma#intcid=_the-new-yorker-homepage-bkt-a_e781db88-9438-4a28-9a85-6d91dd327556_cygnus-personalized

  AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]