Arwa Damon on the precarious mental health of the survivors in Gaza

Christiane Amanpour: I want to ask you about what you witnessed also because I think you're focusing a lot on the children and particularly on mental health.  And you wrote in an op-ed for CNN, essentially everybody appears to be a zombie on the brink of insanity.  Here's what you wrote: "The constant bombardment is a dagger plunged repeatedly into the gaping wound of a crushed psyche.  The soundtrack of every night and day is the relentless buzz of drones that taunts, 'Oh, you think you've survived?  Just wait, death can still come.'"  So, how did that show up in the children or the parents who you spoke to?

Arwa Damon: You see it in their face.  People's eyes are dead.  That spark isn't there.  Movements are very lethargic.  They're very mechanical.  And the children and the activities that we do, it all centers really around play so you're trying to kind of coax that back a little bit, but then you also see it in people's tone of voice.  There was this one mother I met and she comes up and says, "Listen, I don't know what to do about my 7 year old son because he's screaming every night.  He's rocking back and forth.  And he's been this way ever since he saw his sister decapitated.  Her head was blown off by a bomb."  And what she was saying was horrific, but what was even more jarring was the fact that she was there.  She saw this happen to her daughter and she delivered the story in a monotone.  And that's when you realize that she has had to shove all this pain down so deep that she can't even let emotion crack through because if she does, she's going to shatter into a million pieces.  And so many people there have had to do that.  They've had to shove this all down.

~ Arwa Damon, "''People's eyes are dead,' former reporter and humanitarian Arwa Damon no the trauma in Gaza," 4:10 mark, June 4, 2024