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Tag: entire generation

  • Contributor: Gaza remains a crisis of children’s mental health

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    As a psychologist in the occupied West Bank, I have spent my career sitting across from children carrying burdens no child should ever know — lives shaped not by playgrounds or classrooms, but by constant fear.

    I recognize that fear because I lived it myself. I remember when I was less than 5 years old, Israeli soldiers stormed our home in the middle of the night and took my father from his bed. The pounding on the door, the shouting, the terror — those memories are still vivid.

    Children who wake from nightmares convinced Israeli soldiers are coming for their families.

    Children who flinch at the slam of a door.

    Children who can recognize the sound of drones and fighter jets before they can multiply or divide.

    I have helped them process arrests, home demolitions, settler violence, humiliation at checkpoints and the grinding, quiet stress of growing up without ever feeling safe.

    I joined the Palestine Red Crescent Society in 2021 because I knew it was one of the few relief organizations willing to go where the need was greatest — into red zones, near the separation wall, close to illegal settlements and even in active conflict areas. Mental health services are scarce and often inaccessible for Palestinians. If children were hurting in the hardest-to-reach places, I wanted to be there with them.

    I thought I understood trauma.

    I thought I knew how to guide children through fear.

    I thought I had the tools.

    Then, on Jan. 29, 2024, the phone rang. It was a call from Gaza.

    Five-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped in a small car, surrounded by the bodies of her six relatives, who had just been killed. Israeli tanks were closing in. Gunfire crackled in the background. She was whispering into the phone so no one nearby would hear her.

    “I’m scared. They’re shooting at us. … Please come get me,” she repeated again and again.

    For hours, we tried to reach her. Our ambulance was minutes away, but it needed clearance from Israeli authorities to enter the area. We waited for permission that came hours later, only to be ignored.

    Inside our operations room in Ramallah, time slowed to something unbearable. With every passing minute, the frustration and helplessness grew heavier.

    All I could do was talk to her.

    How do I keep a child hopeful when she’s trapped alone among her dead family members?

    How do I make her feel safe when tanks surround her?

    How do I keep her conscious and focused on anything but the immediate trauma?

    I kept reminding her to breathe. To keep talking. To stay awake.

    Above all, one thought kept repeating in my mind: She is 5. Just 5 years old. Barely old enough to tie her shoes. Barely old enough to read on her own. And yet she was alone, asking strangers to come save her.

    Near the end, her voice grew faint. She told me she was bleeding. “From where,” I asked. “My mouth, my tummy, my legs — everywhere,” she whispered. I tried to stay calm and told her to use her blouse to wipe off the blood. Then she said something I will never forget: “I don’t want to. My mother will get tired from washing my clothes.”

    Even then — alone, terrified, wounded and hungry — she was thinking about her mother who would have extra laundry to wash. Those were the last words I heard.

    We lost Hind that day. We also lost two of my brave colleagues, Yousef Zeino and Ahmad Almadhoun, when their ambulance was struck as they waited for clearance to reach her. They were just minutes away.

    Hind’s story is not an exception. It is one of tens of thousands of children in Gaza.

    For more than two years now, children in Gaza have opened their eyes each morning to displacement, loss, violence and little access to even the most basic needs. At least 20,000 children have been killed since October 2023, an average of at least 24 children killed each day, the equivalent of an entire classroom. And we recognize this is a gross undercount as so many children remain buried under rubble. Tens of thousands have been forced from their homes. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have been destroyed and doctors and medical personnel detained and targeted.

    This is not only a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. It is also a mental health crisis.

    Children in Gaza are not only surviving bombs and displacement; they are carrying an overwhelming psychological burden that grows heavier each day. Nearly every child is at risk of famine or getting sick from preventable diseases. More than 650,000 have no access to school, and more than 1.2 million children need immediate psychological support. Reports on the ground show that more than 39,300 children have lost one or both parents, including about 17,000 who have become orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are trapped with nowhere safe to go, living in a world defined by fear and instability.

    Healing is impossible when the threat never stops and when schools and healthcare systems have collapsed. Trauma doesn’t fade under these unbearable conditions; it accumulates. The consequences could be irreversible.

    We are witnessing the psychological injury of an entire generation.

    Immediate action is imperative. A real, permanent ceasefire is the first step toward stability, but it must be followed by the rapid restoration of healthcare and education, with sustained investment in psychosocial and mental health support. Mental health cannot be an afterthought in a humanitarian response but must be central from the beginning. Without these interventions, the psychological toll will only deepen, shaping an entire generation with long-term consequences for their well-being and for the future of the Palestinian people.

    And above all, children must be protected from continued violence, because no therapy can compete with ongoing trauma.

    Hind’s last words will haunt me forever. The world failed her. It has failed the children of Palestine. But there’s still time to save the ones who remain. Through the film “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” her voice will continue to travel across borders, carrying the truth of what children in Gaza and the West Bank endure day after day.

    It is not just another story. It is a call we must answer.

    Nisreen Qawas is a psychologist with the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

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    Nisreen Qawas

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  • Biden’s Cancellation of Billions in Debt Won’t Solve the Larger Problem

    Biden’s Cancellation of Billions in Debt Won’t Solve the Larger Problem

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    For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.

    Today, calls for relief were answered when President Joe Biden announced that his administration would be canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for those with federal debt, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. As long as a borrower makes less than $125,000 a year, or makes less than $250,000 alongside a spouse, they would be eligible for cancellation. The president will also extend the current loan-repayment pause—originally enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020 as a pandemic-relief measure—until December 31.

    The debt relief—which by one estimate could cost a total of $300 billion—is a massive benefit for Americans who have struggled to repay loans they accrued attending college, whether they completed a degree or not. But equally as important as addressing the damage that student loans have caused is ensuring that Americans aren’t saddled with overwhelming debt again. And the underlying issue of college affordability can be addressed only if America once again views higher education as a public good. Belatedly canceling some student debt is what a country does when it refuses to support students up front.

    According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled.  “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.

    Read: How the Democrats got radical on student debt

    When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.

    Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.

    The shift flies in the face of the Framers’ view of higher education, though. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” George Washington, an early proponent of the idea of a national university, said in his first address before Congress, in 1790. “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and others believed that colleges might be a place where Americans could build a national identity—a place where they could, for lack of better words, become good citizens.

    In that spirit, the federal government provided massive investments in the nation’s colleges, albeit inequitably—through the Morrill Act, which formed the backbone of state higher-education systems as we know them; the GI Bill; and the Pell Grant program—which directly subsidize students’ expenses. But in the past half century, radical investments in higher-education access have dried up. Now a political divide has opened up: Conservative lawmakers—whose voters are more likely not to have attended college—have grown not only suspicious of but in some cases openly hostile toward the enterprise.

    Read: America is divided by education

    Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats believe that the government should subsidize college education. “We want our young people to realize that they can have a good future,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in April. “One of the best, very best, top-of-the-list ways to do it is by canceling student debt.” He wanted the president to be ambitious and called for giving borrowers $50,000 in relief—“even going higher after that.” A month into his administration, though, Biden shot down the idea of $50,000, to the chagrin of relief advocates. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and Wisdom Cole argued today. “It hardly achieves anything—only making a mere dent in the problem.”

    The administration is coupling its announcement with a redesign of payment plans that allows borrowers to cap their monthly loan payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income. But the basic problem remains: Young Americans of modest means can no longer afford to attend their state university by getting a part-time job and taking out a small loan. For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree. Biden’s plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.

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    Adam Harris

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