KARACHI: While almost 31,000 Palestinians have been killed and 175,000 buildings destroyed by Israeli bombing in Gaza, the psychological trauma and mental pain of Palestinians, which is beyond comprehension for the outside world, is going to haunt them for the rest of their lives, legal experts and rights activists told attendees at a seminar on Saturday evening.

The seminar organised by the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) was titled ‘Humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Palestine’.

Mohammad Oves Anwar, Director Research Society of International Law (RSIL) was the first of the three speakers. He gave an overview of the crisis and international laws in order to understand what’s happening in the region.

He said Gaza is the home to 2.3 million Palestinians, almost 31,000 have been martyred and 72,500 injured.

Over 31,000 people killed, 175,000 buildings have been destroyed in Israeli bombing

About 75 per cent of the entire population of Gaza has been displaced; 1.5m people have been crammed into the tiny portion of Rafah, the last bastion of any protection. “Israel has already started to attack it… Every bomb will have multiple casualties. Another startling fact is that 175,000 buildings, every single institution of higher learning, have been destroyed. That is, 61 per cent of built structure of Gaza has been destroyed.”

He said the other concept that he wanted to look at was that of the occupation. “An occupation is a territory which is held by another country to which it does not have any lawful excuse to be there. After the global acceptance of UN Charter in 1945, acquisition of territory through conquest, through military attack, is simply not possible. You have blanket prohibition on the use of force or the threat of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Therefore, any territory occupied after 1945 cannot become part of another state. If it does become part of another state, it’s called annexation. We have recognised opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and of the Israeli high court which say that the territory of West Bank, Gaza is occupied territory. Every attempt of settlement is a form of annexation, unlawful by definition.”

After informing the audience on how Israel violates international laws, Mr Anwar concluded his speech with the silver lining that “international laws give us the language of critique”.

Barrister, writer and human rights defender Sana Pirzada in a moving presentation highlighted the psychological impact of the war on the people of Gaza. She said: “Mental illnesses are scars that cannot be seen. Death is lamentable, but it brings your pain to an end, whereas a mental illness is something that you have to live with for the rest of your life, which is what the people of Gaza have been doing for decades.”

She as a lawyer wrote a letter to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court because a few months ago he was asking everyone to send evidence that was required to prosecute Netanyahu and his team. “I said to him you and I have never been in a war zone, we do not know what the sound of bombs is like, we do not know what it feels like to wake up in a hospital to find our loved ones lying dead, we do not know what it feels to see the sight of dead children… If you have to live with something like that for the rest of your life, how is it going to impact you?”

Ms Pirzada sharing some statistics with the attendees said that the World Bank in 2022 found that more than half of the adult population in Gaza had screened positive for depression; a smaller number showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Before the war, more than 500,000 children required mental help and psychosocial support. Now unfortunately the number has risen to over a million. What’s more painful is that half of the children in Gaza have contemplated suicide. Children as young as five have said that they’d rather die than live.”

She said there are people in Gaza with obsessive compulsive disorder and there are those who have nightmares and shut their windows because they feel something is about to happen, someone is about to barge in or a bomb is about to explode. She also mentioned anxiety and insomnia. “Kids have nightmares of soldiers ransacking their homes. Ten thousand children have been killed. The blasts have led to amputations and according to the UN nearly 335,000 children under five have a high risk of severe malnutrition. Incubators have shut down. Children have lost limbs… Unicef has said that the Gaza strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”

Ms Pirzada quoting a news outlet said most of the children in Gaza like to be engineers when they grow up because they want to rebuild Gaza or become doctors to help people because they’ve lost loved ones in front of their eyes. She rounded off her speech by saying that despite hell, the people of Gaza have shown resilience and adapted to community-based coping strategies.

Shahrukh Shahnawaz, advocate High Court of Sindh, shed light on the international community’s role in resolving the Palestinian conflict.

He said the birth of the modern international community was seen after the Second World War with the creation of the UN in 1945 along with the beginning of the Palestine conflict in 1948. The UN started with 51 members which later increased to 193. “It is estimated that between 1945 and 1960 around three dozen new states emerged after being freed from the control of their colonial masters. This allowed the former colonies to raise their collective voice against their former colonial masters.”

Earlier, Chairperson PIIA Dr Masuma Hasan introduced the speakers to the audience.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2024