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In Gaza, silence has become the only language left for thousands of children who have survived the ongoing genocide but not its psychological aftermath.

In recent months, international and local organisations have documented a surge in cases of children losing the ability to speak—not due to physical injuries, but because of the unbearable psychological trauma of war.

According to a report by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP), increasing numbers of children exhibit severe post-traumatic symptoms, including chronic nightmares, hypersensitivity to loud sounds, and bedwetting. Many remain completely silent despite having no damage to their vocal cords.

Doctors identify this condition as “traumatic mutism”—a psychological disorder in which overwhelming fear or shock silences a child’s voice, forcing them to communicate instead through gestures, looks, or repetitive movements.

“Psychological exhaustion in Gaza has become widespread,” said Dr Yasser Abu Jamea, Director of the GCMHP. “Medical teams are working under conditions of annihilation that make the continuation of treatment nearly impossible.”

A doctor with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) described the situation starkly: “A child in Gaza doesn’t live with the memory of one airstrike—they live waiting for the next.”

Speech therapist Heba Haidar, a specialist in language and swallowing disorders, told Quds Press that reports from UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have confirmed cases of stuttering and speech loss directly linked to exposure to Israeli bombings.

“Children pulled from beneath the rubble have stopped speaking,” Haidar said. “Even adolescents are struggling to form words—as if language itself has broken under the weight of trauma.”

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Before the latest escalation, more than half of Gaza’s children already showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to mental health surveys. Now, Haidar warns, those psychological wounds have deepened into a “linguistic and emotional collapse” that threatens an entire generation.

Efforts by therapists abroad to provide remote treatment have been obstructed by power cuts, communication blackouts, and continued bombardment. “Specialists in Jordan have tried to volunteer their services to children in Gaza,” Haidar revealed, “but ongoing shelling and the total collapse of communication networks have made these efforts nearly impossible.”

She cautioned that experiences from Rwanda, Bosnia, and Syria show that untreated war trauma can persist across generations if children are not provided with psychological care today.

Despite the devastation, Haidar believes that an “urgent psychological response plan” can still be implemented inside Gaza. She envisins mobile mental health units in displacement camps, child-centered play therapy, and structured pronunciation exercises for children with speech loss—alongside remote support programs coordinated with international experts. “The world must listen to Gaza’s silent children,” Haidar said. “They are not just victims of war—they are survivors losing their voices. Helping them speak again means helping them reclaim their humanity.”

Since October 2023, Israeli forces—backed by US and European support—have waged a campaign of destruction across the Gaza Strip, defying international appeals and orders from the International Court of Justice to halt the assault.

The genocide has left more than 238,000 Palestinians dead or wounded, most of them women and children. Over 11,000 remain missing, while famine, displacement, and the near-total destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure have erased entire neighbourhoods from the map.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.