Trapped — Gaza's children before this war, after fifteen years of blockade

The most useful thing about this report is its date. It was released on 15 June 2022, from Gaza City — before the war that has dominated the record since. It measures what fifteen years of blockade alone had already done to the children of the Strip, and it does so by repeating a survey the same organisation had run four years earlier, so the comparison is internal rather than borrowed.

For the report, titled Trapped, Save the Children “consulted 488 children and 168 parents and caregivers in the Gaza Strip in a repeat of similar research by the child rights organisation in 2018.” The finding it led with: “Fifteen years of life under blockade has left four out of five children in the Gaza Strip reporting that they live with depression, grief and fear.” Children reporting emotional distress rose “to 80% from 55%” over those four years.

The itemised comparison against 2018 is the part worth keeping: children reporting feeling fearful, “84% compared to 50% in 2018”; nervous, “80% compared to 55%”; sad or depressed, “77% compared to 62%”; grieving, “78% compared to 55%”. The release also states that “more than half of Gaza’s children have contemplated suicide and three out of five are self-harming” — its own endnotes give those as 55% and 59%.

Caregivers were asked separately, and their answers describe the mechanism by which a siege becomes a childhood: 79% reported an increase in bedwetting, 78% that their children rarely completed tasks, and “about 59% said there had been an increase in children experiencing difficulties in speech, language and communication, including temporary reactive mutism”. 96% of caregivers reported “feeling unhappy and constantly anxious.”

The report quotes a fourteen-year-old, Amr, on the escalation of the previous year: “During the night, I couldn’t sleep because I had a nightmare. I was really afraid that they would bomb our house or would bomb our neighbours again.” And it quotes Ameera, also fourteen, asked what would change if the blockade were lifted: she would “feel more connected to the whole world”, and would “study computer science and specifically get a degree in virtual reality design. This is what I really want to do in my life but I can’t do it here in Gaza, we don’t have such a programme.”

Jason Lee, then Save the Children’s country director for the occupied Palestinian territories, said of the 2018 round: “caregivers said that their capacity to support their children is being pushed to the limit by the blockade, chronic poverty, and insecurity, and would most likely be utterly destroyed in the event of another conflict. Our findings show that caregivers’ concerns have sadly come true.”

Read this before reading anything about 2023 onwards. Every figure published since is a change from this baseline, not from a normal one.

Why it matters

• A dated, methodologically stated pre-war measurement, which is what makes later figures interpretable rather than merely shocking.
• Its 2018-to-2022 comparison is internal to one organisation and one instrument, so the deterioration is not an artefact of different studies.
• Ameera’s answer is the record of a specific ambition, foreclosed by a specific policy. That is more precise, and harder to argue with, than any adjective.

Key resources

• After 15 years of blockade, four out of five children in Gaza say they are living with depression, grief and fear — Save the Children International, 15 June 2022
• Trapped — Save the Children Resource Centre