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| Protesters call for the release of all hostages during a march outside the IDF headquarters Tel Aviv, Israel, on 23 December. Photograph: Alexi J Rosenfeld/Getty Images |
Many of the hostages released from detention in Gaza by Hamas in November still require intensive treatment for the trauma from their weeks in captivity, according to Renana Eitan, the head of psychiatry at the Ichilov Tel Aviv medical centre. Eitan said that the hostages had undergone the worst abuse and trauma she had witnessed in her career. Of the 14 freed hostages treated at her center, nine are under 18 and two are under 10. Most need long-term treatment for trauma. Some have gone to other facilities around the country, and Eitan said six are still receiving "very intensive psychiatric and psychological care" at the Ichilov centre.
Eitan said news footage of joyful reunions as 120 hostages were released in the last week of November masked a darker underlying reality. At first, they seemed very happy and relieved, but after a day or two, they realized that they had severe nightmares, intrusive memories, frightened, and severe dissociative symptoms. She added that some of them were afraid to go to sleep because they still felt like they were still in Hamas captivity.
All of the hostages in her care had either directly experienced or witnessed sexual abuse, adding to the widespread accounts of other female hostages. Even small children, she said, had witnessed such abuse. One of the women treated at the center had been kept with a second woman in a cage measuring 1 metre by 1.5 meters, while another female hostage under Eitan's care spent four days underground in complete darkness.
The trauma experienced by hundreds of thousands of children and their parents in Gaza will also have long-term debilitating effects, particularly as there are no therapeutic facilities left. Few of Gaza's hospitals are functioning any more, even for operating on the severely injured. With an estimated 8,000 children killed in Gaza, and many tens of thousands more injured and orphaned, the UN children's fund has said the Gaza Strip is "the most dangerous place in the world to be a child."
James Gordon, a US psychiatrist and founder and head of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, said that recovery was possible even in severely traumatised children, but only if the outside world did not give up on them. He believes how they will ultimately respond and act depends on how much understanding they receive, how great a sense of control they can achieve, and how much material and psychological support they get from a world they feel has largely abandoned them.
