Shell-shocked Children Who Are Drawn Into the Cult of the Martyr

The bombing, shelling and shooting will stop one day. The electricity and water will be restored. And the windows of the Mousa family's flat, every one of them blown out by Israeli air force strikes on the Palestinian president's palace next door, will be replaced.

But the trauma of the four Mousa children, aged three to nine years old, will not so easily be erased. For nearly two weeks now they have endured a constant barrage of shells from navy ships they can see through the plastic now covering the windows of their seafront flat in Gaza city, as well as the air force strikes on buildings nearby.

"The children scream and cry when there's shelling. It goes on all night," said their father, Raed, 35. "Every night, all night. The building shakes. We moved into the kitchen and sleep there. It's the safest place in the house. But my children are very scared, their faces turn yellow. The sound of the guns is very loud. We try to keep them busy playing and with their toys."

Their mother, Ahlan, is pregnant. "I look at them at night when they are sleeping and they are dreaming bad dreams. Safud [aged four] jumps from her bed screaming and crying," she said. "All the time they are shelling. It's terrifying. I don't know what to tell the children. I say the sound is loud but it is still far away. But I can see they are afraid and that makes me afraid."

That trauma may last a lifetime, with devastating consequences for Palestinian society, according to psychologists who have studied the impact of two decades of bloody conflict in the Gaza strip on children who have grown up under army watchtowers, dodging bullets, seeing classmates shot as they sat at the next desk, watching tanks and bulldozers destroy thousands of homes.

Even after the Israelis pulled Jewish settlers out of Gaza in 2005, children and their parents have had to endure regular rocket attacks and punishing sonic booms when Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over the territory. Now there is the bombing and fighting that has left more than 600 Palestinians dead in less than a fortnight.

Gaza's leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, who has studied the effects of violence and trauma on children for 20 years, said about 65% of young people in the enclave suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"There are many other traumatic symptoms, like headaches and abdominal pain and vomiting. There's an inability to concentrate, panic, anxiety, irritability," he said. "I've observed much change in the children. They are more anxious, more fearful. Children are panicky because of the explosions. Children want to leave. You hear it. They feel there is no hope, that the world can't do anything for them and they can't do anything for themselves."

Thabet says the impact of trauma on older children combines with other experiences to push them to extremes.

The image of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Gaza boy shot dead as his father vainly tried to protect him from Israeli gunfire at the beginning of the second intifada, is seared on the Palestinian consciousness. To many Palestinian adults it symbolizes Israeli indifference to the lives of their children. But psychologists say that to many children its principal impact is to see a father who cannot protect his son.

With that - and humiliations such as Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian men in front of their children - has come a collapse in respect for the regular systems of authority.

The perpetual killing has also drawn many children into the cult of the "martyr" and led them to expect an early death.

Thabet said the traumatizing of children was having a profound effect on Gaza's future. The children he studied in the early 1990s are now adults.

"They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatized children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community. You saw it in the factional fighting in Gaza in 2007," he said.

"So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behavior. They will go to more extremes because they have no future. This is a problem. I've been warning people of this but nobody was listening. It's a cycle of aggression.

"Children see their parents killed in front of them. What do you expect?"