The New Yorker
Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma
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