As of late 2024, across Gaza and the West Bank, 800,000 people had received some sort of mental health or psychosocial support for their trauma. For The New Yorker, Mohammed Mhawish chronicled the work of mental health clinicians attempting to offer these services in Gaza. He spoke with the Institute for Public Accuracy about the difficulty of reporting on the story.
MOHAMMED MHAWISH; [email protected]
Mhawish is a Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza.
Mhawish said: “This was one of the most difficult stories I’ve had to write in the last two years. It’s been in my head for a long time. It took me this long to publish it for a number of reasons. First was the challenge of keeping in touch with sources with Gaza. Reaching people and maintaining fully fledged conversations was basically impossible. I would sometimes get a voice note and then people went offline for two weeks. Second, it was a very underreported story, so I didn’t have a lot of research assistance and couldn’t do my due diligence in a few days. It took weeks to wrap my head around what resources were available out there. The story of mental health has been underreported in the last two years. We are always looking at the physical scenes of destruction––schools, hospitals, neighborhoods.
“I wanted to go deeper, into the invisible destruction happening inside the heads of people, particularly children. It was a very personal story, because I have a child. Rafik was only three when he was buried under the rubble of our house and rescued alive. That experience still [impacts] how Rafik looks at things around him. He is still triggered by different scenes and voices––by a police helicopter, the voice of a bird, a sudden shut of a door. As someone who has [fled Gaza and] survived this, I’m not concerned about my physical safety, but I have my own mental dilemmas when it comes to healing and recovering as a father and as a journalist who has reported from the ground: death, blood, bodies, people shot and killed. I have reported from places that were bombed and destroyed and spoken with survivors who lost children and entire families. The mourning and grieving never stopped, even after I fled Gaza.
“This story includes a personal reflection on how trauma has lingered in those who survived the war, but it also gives a platform to people who are still inside. My voice is not the center of the story. The priority is to give the microphone to people there who are grappling with the collapse of the mental health system. There are not many practitioners left. They are trying to provide assistance to people who have no food, even while they have no food. They can’t promise their families dinners or a safe or clean bed to sleep in at the end of the day, because they’re part of the same struggles they’re trying to heal people from. They are lacking everything they need to keep doing this work… I was very careful to tell the story in a factual way but not distort it in a way that exploits these people. At times, I had to stop talking to sources because they were being harmed more than they were being helped by our conversations.
“Now that the story has come out, these practitioners are still trapped inside Gaza and unable to leave. Their stories are out, but they are still maintaining the same kind of status.”