Gaza's Silent Trauma: Children Losing Speech as War Devastates Mental Health

Katrin Glatz Brubakk arrived in Gaza carrying the weight of twelve years spent in conflict zones—the Congo, Lebanon, the Mediterranean on rescue boats, Turkey after the earthquake. Nothing prepared her for what she found. The child psychotherapist from Norway, working with Médicos Sin Fronteras, encountered something she had never witnessed before: an entire population of children whose minds had begun to shut down.

Adam was five years old when the war started in October 2023. He was the kind of child who talked constantly, who loved to play outside, who filled rooms with noise and movement. His family fled their home and lived in a tent. One day, Adam and his father decided to visit his grandparents, who lived in what seemed like a safer area. There had been no evacuation order. They thought it was secure. A projectile struck without warning, wounding both of them severely. In the hospital emergency room, lying on the floor because there were no beds, Adam watched his father take his last breath. The boy lost one leg and suffered severe injuries to the other. After that day, Adam stopped speaking. He would only whisper isolated words to his mother. He barely ate. He had withdrawn entirely from the world.

Adam's case was not unique. Brubakk reported finding dozens of children who had lost the ability to speak, and local doctors told Al Jazeera the number was growing. When a child experiences severe trauma and lives for extended periods in overwhelming uncertainty—as all of Gaza's children have for more than two and a half years—the nervous system reaches a breaking point. Some children become hyperactive, unable to sleep, irritable. Others do the opposite: they retreat completely. Their nervous system essentially surrenders. Withdrawal becomes protection. Language becomes unnecessary in a world that only brings pain. It is not a conscious choice but a neurological response to extreme stress.

Brubakk was direct about the scale: "There is no child in Gaza who is not traumatized. There are more than one million children who have experienced severe trauma." Every child has fled, lost their home, been unable to attend school because schools are bombed. Every child has lost someone—a family member, a classmate, a teacher, a neighbor. Many have seen mutilated bodies, smelled blood, helped collect human remains from streets. Most have experienced this not once but repeatedly. Beyond the specific horrors, they have lost something more fundamental: the basic sense that the world is safe, that people mean them no harm, that tomorrow will come. No child in Gaza can go to sleep knowing they will wake up. There is no room to enter and lock the door. The war has not just traumatized them; it has shattered their entire understanding of existence.

When a child stops speaking and interacting, development halts. A five-year-old should be practicing language with other children and adults, learning to solve problems, absorbing social norms through play. All of that stops. The silence is a symptom, but the damage runs deeper. Brubakk explained what happens in the brain: the amygdala, the part responsible for intense emotions, physically enlarges in traumatized children—this can be measured. The prefrontal cortex, which develops later and handles planning, problem-solving, social interaction, and emotional regulation, becomes underdeveloped. It is thinner, with fewer neural connections. If a child remains in Adam's state—withdrawn, not developing, not speaking, trapped in extreme stress—the damage may be permanent. "They will never recover," Brubakk said. She knows this from her own family. Her brother was adopted from Vietnam in 1974, after the war there. He grew up as Gaza's children are growing up now, with constant bombardment, uncertainty, food scarcity. When he arrived in Norway to safety and plenty, it took years before he stopped hiding food behind books on shelves. He did not feel safe. These are what Brubakk calls "the cognitive injuries of war"—invisible, possibly lifelong.

Brubakk's work with Adam began with presence. She and her team visited his room every day, talking with his mother about the husband she had lost, but also about good memories and hopes for the future—small seeds of the idea that this was not the end. One day, Adam suddenly whispered to his mother: "Make that woman go away. I don't like her." It was rejection, but Brubakk was elated. He was interacting. Days later, he looked at her—something he had not done before. She seized the moment. "Wow, you have enormous brown eyes. They're beautiful. Mine are completely different—they're blue. Have you ever seen?" Curiosity flickered in the five-year-old. Slowly, over time, he began to trust people again, to speak briefly, to return to something resembling normalcy, though he carries all the trauma with him.

With another child, Mona, six years old, Brubakk used soap bubbles. Mona had been burned across her entire body when a bomb hit her family's apartment after they returned from a tent, thinking it was safe. Two of her brothers died instantly. A gas canister ignited, and fire consumed the room. Her father pulled out three girls, all burned. Mona was wrapped in so many bandages that only her eyes and nostrils were visible. Brubakk called the bubbles "bubbles of hope." They are impossible to ignore—beautiful, calming, full of rainbow colors. To make large bubbles, you must blow slowly and deeply. Slow, deep breathing calms the nervous system. By giving the amygdala—the brain's alarm system—a chance to settle, the prefrontal cortex gets space to develop. It does not solve the problem entirely, but it gives these children better odds against the long-term cognitive damage war inflicts. One day, Mona said she wanted a "princess house"—a dollhouse. Brubakk found cardboard, tape, and paint. Together they built a two-story house. Mona decorated it carefully. She and her sister were playing with it when the bomb fell. But through play, through building, Mona found words. She told Brubakk what had happened, how worried she was about her sisters. Play became the language for processing trauma.

Brubakk has worked in conflict zones for twelve years. She has seen suffering in many forms. But she is clear: Gaza is incomparable. The level of trauma, the level of destruction, the fact that there is no escape, no safe place anywhere, the systematic attack on the health system itself—hospitals bombed—it is unlike anything she has witnessed. She wants to return. As of January 1st, international staff have been barred from entering. She said simply: "If I could go to Gaza, I would go in a heartbeat. It is the only place I want to be." What Gaza's children need now, she said, is what only peace can provide: safe places to live, schools to attend, a future that is not predetermined by trauma. "Otherwise," she warned, "we are destroying an entire generation of children."