"How do you keep going? How can you keep helping others when you
yourself are suffering? Have you ever completely fallen apart? Can youstill move forward?" ---- These are the questions I hear over and over
again from journalists, friends, colleagues abroad, and even strangers
online. And, honestly, I ask them of myself as well. ---- For more than
21 months, I have lived through an unrelenting war in Gaza. I am a
mental health professional; but here, that title is far from enough. In
Gaza, we do not have the privilege of being just one thing. I am a
therapist, yes. But I am also a woman enduring loss. I am a mother
trying to protect her children. I am a daughter mourning loved ones. I
am a healthcare worker exhausted by war, a broken soul carrying the pain
of others. I am a witness to unspeakable crimes. I care for the wounded
while bearing my own wounds. I am all these roles at once, inseparably
intertwined. I heal, I break, I hold on, I fall apart.
Since the start of this war, I have lived a triple life. I try to help
heal a community drowning in trauma, even as I grieve my loved ones,
even as I rise from the rubble after each new bombardment. I try to keep
my voice alive, to continue bearing witness, even as fear grips my
throat with its claws every day. Today, as I write this, I am living
through some of the darkest days of the war. I will not be ashamed to
say: I am hungry; and my hunger is no accident. It is the result of
blockade, of policies, of deliberate deprivation - but the shame is not
mine. It belongs to a world that preaches humanity and human rights
while Gaza is bombed, starved, and silenced.
Who am I now? Am I still a "therapist"? Or am I also a victim, a
refugee, a grieving daughter, a fearful mother, a humanitarian clinging
to hope with bare hands?
I have learned to teach my children patience with hunger.
Since we began working in refugee camps, we have never practiced under
normal conditions. Hospitals bombed, medical teams killed or arrested,
clinics evacuated, roads made impassable. And yet we persist; not only
out of professional duty but from a deeper moral sense. We kiss our
children goodbye each morning, terrified it could be the last time. Then
we begin the day's sessions - in tents, in corners of shelters, or among
ruins.
My sense of self has changed; all of our lives have changed. I have lost
everything I once considered normal. I have learned to cry while moving
forward, to bury my dead in my heart and keep serving the living. I have
learned to dodge death, to carry anxiety for 21 endless months, to pray
for friends trapped under rubble. But I have also learned resilience. I
have discovered a strength I didn't know I had. Is it because there were
no other options? Perhaps. But more surely, it is because faith in God
and in the dignity of our people is a force that carries us through the
unimaginable.
I have learned to survive in a place unfit for life. To ration water for
days. To go without basic necessities. To teach my children to endure
hunger. A friend told us that her son - like most children these days -
once complained of hunger. But when he saw the pain on her face, he
immediately apologized, tears in his eyes: "I'm sorry, Mama, I'm not
hungry. Please don't be sad." He was just trying to protect her from
pain by denying his own. No child should ever feel guilty or have to
apologize for hunger.
What does neutrality mean in the face of atrocities?
Every day I sit with people shattered by loss. Yet I am no stranger to
their stories. I live this war too. I suffer the same pain, bear the
same wounds. A 15-year-old boy once told me he wished he had died with
his family. My heart broke with him. A mother confessed she could no
longer feed her children. She whispered: "I can't do it anymore."
Quietly I thought: "Neither can I."
This is what we call "compassion fatigue" - when endless witnessing of
suffering begins to erode the soul. When you feel you have nothing left
to give, but you keep showing up anyway. It is akin to "burnout," the
chronic emotional exhaustion of those working in environments steeped in
pain, danger, and scarcity.
We do not counsel from quiet offices. We try to plant hope in
overcrowded tents and bombed-out schools. Children talk about missiles
the way others talk about breakfast: casually, as if it were routine.
And yet, even amid this horror, mental health workers are still asked to
remain neutral. But what does neutrality mean in the face of atrocity?
Am I supposed to pat children on the shoulder and say "it will be okay"
when I know they will never forget the smell of blood? How can I speak
of safety to those who now see danger in every sound, every shadow,
every color?
The truth is, sometimes we don't speak at all. In some sessions, silence
is all we have. But presence can be enough. To be there, to bear
witness, to sit with someone in their pain without having to fix it -
even that can be healing. The smile of a child after days of crying, a
woman finally able to rest after a panic storm, the gratitude of an
elderly man after being truly heard: these are the moments that help us
keep going.
What warms my heart is how we hold each other
We are not alone in this grief. Around me are colleagues whose strength
humbles me daily. Each carries a story of unimaginable loss, yet they
keep going. A dear colleague, a gentle and caring doctor, lost his
entire family at once. Despite his profound pain and suffering, he
returned to work and to care for those around him. Even in his grief, he
lifted us and reminded us why we continue. Another colleague lost his
daughter. Another, her husband. And all of us, each one, have lost
everything we once had: our homes, our streets, our memories, our loved
ones. And yet we are here; tired, grieving, hungry; driven by something
greater than pain: a deep, quiet love for our people. We pour what
remains of our hearts into our work.
Sometimes circumstances force us to evacuate a clinic, and a heavy guilt
sets in because we know how much people depend on us. But this guilt is
not weakness: it is the measure of our love. This pain is the fuel that
keeps us going.
What warms my heart is how we embrace each other. How we check on each
other in the middle of chaos. How we cry together when one of us is
lost. How we share our exhaustion, our pain, our helplessness, and still
somehow plant hope in each other. "This will end," we say. "God will
return what was taken from us." We remind the most desperate among us:
"One day, we will look back and say: we survived." We have carried each
other.
I look at my colleagues and see "courage wrapped in pain." We hold each
other up, we remind one another that this will end, that justice will
come, that our people deserve life. So how do we go on? Perhaps the
better question is: how could we not?
To stop would be to let darkness win. We may be exhausted, but we are
not broken. Not yet. Because Gaza is not only a land of pain and rubble;
it is a land of fierce resilience, a place where humanity insists on
shining even through the deepest horror. We are still here. And together
we will heal.
As the poet Elia Abu Madi reminds us: "To despair, I believe, is a
betrayal - of those who lived with hope or died still dreaming."
Nour Z. Jarada
Mental Health Manager
Doctors of the World - Gaza
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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