Samah Jabr, a psychiatrist and the former head of mental health at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, has said incidents like the detention and stripping of Palestinian children are causing a crisis for them, Al Jazeera reports.
Recently, Israeli forces reportedly detained and stripped two Palestinian boys, aged seven and 13, during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
“I see many adults who have psychological suffering because of experiences of political violence that they lived [through] when they were children. Because of detentions, home demolitions, home raids [and] detention of family members,” Jabr said from the city of Nablus.
“These experiences leave scars immediately, and also for generations to come… And it’s very important to provide psychosocial support for affected children as soon as possible following a traumatic event like this, whether physical violence or psychological humiliation, which is commonplace in Palestine,” she was quoted as saying.
“It leaves a big scar on the child. And if they don’t deal with it immediately, they will integrate a sense of worthlessness and inferiority.”