LEILA FADEL, HOST:
There are the wounds we see in Gaza. People shot trying to get aid, journalists killed, the emaciated bodies of children, of their parents. The thousands of children's names on the roster of the dead. But then there are the unseen wounds. The nightmares, the debilitating fear, the silence.
Mohammed Mhawish is a Palestinian journalist from Gaza. He got out last year. But the trauma he lived through is still in his body, in his child's body. And that's why he chose to write about the mental health practitioners in Gaza trying to treat those unseen wounds as they fall apart themselves.
MOHAMMED MHAWISH: Surviving outside Gaza, you know, comes with a different kind of weight. There is the guilt of having made it out when so many of my colleagues and friends and family, they're all still trapped inside.
FADEL: I think what's so impactful about your work is it is this very diligent reporting, right? Interviews with others, but it's also interwoven with your own experiences that echo those that you're covering. And there's an honesty and a genuineness to that. And that's the case in this piece in The New Yorker. How did you start to think about working on this piece, and what did you want to convey?
MHAWISH: I was covering bombings that were hitting my own neighborhood. And I was interviewing people who were going through things my own family was going through at the same exact time. And so over time, I realized that this was something collective. The trauma we carry as Palestinians is passed down. It is something we have shared, and it is being constantly reactivated. And so, even after leaving, that story stayed on my mind and it didn't leave me. And so my work became a way of holding that, of preserving the memory here.
FADEL: There's a section in the piece where you write about this, about the first time that your son asks you a question. And I was hoping you could read that for us.
MHAWISH: (Reading) The first time my 3 1/2-year-old son, Rafik, asked me are we going to die today was in December of 2023, roughly two months after the war began. We were lying in a recovery bed, still shaking from the blast that had buried us beneath the concrete roof of our house in Gaza City. Rafik was curled up on the ground, close enough that I could see him but too far for me to reach out and hold him. After we were pulled from the rubble, I remember thinking this is the moment that rewires a child forever. I have been watching that shift occur in front of me ever since.
FADEL: When you wrote, I've been watching that shift occur in front of me, was that about Rafik or was that about every person in Gaza?
MHAWISH: It's a mix of both the personal and the collective here. Through the experience of myself and my son, Rafik, and his young generation, I try to capture the story of those thousands like Rafik still inside. And they're still reliving every part of the experience that we have been through.
FADEL: In your piece, you follow several mental health professionals living in Gaza and tell their stories as they try to continue to help their community. Could you tell me a little bit about them?
MHAWISH: The professionals and mental health workers I met, they're based in Gaza at the moment on the ground. One of these therapists that I spoke to lost family in a bombing just weeks before we spoke. And the rest of them, they have been displaced multiple times. One of them is a mother to a child asking for food all the time. And she cannot promise her child a safe space to sleep at night or a proper meal or breakfast in the morning. But they keep going because they have to. One of them told me, we cannot wait until we're healed to help others. We try to heal by helping others.
FADEL: You write about how people aren't dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder because the trauma doesn't stop. And you describe continuous traumatic stress disorder. Can you say what that is and what people are living through in Gaza when it comes to their mental health?
MHAWISH: I mean, trauma in Gaza does not stop. Most people there haven't had a single moment to process what they have been through because there's always another airstrike, another evacuation order, another loss on the way. And so what I have come to learn after this piece is that there is no post in this trauma. It has been ongoing. And that really stuck with me.
People are experiencing repeated layered trauma. They're losing homes. They're losing loved ones. They're living with constant fear, and now extreme hunger and displacement. There is no safety, no security. There is only just surviving each day. And that becomes the priority now.
FADEL: With Gaza, we've seen just painful images of starving children, images of families being killed, but those are physical and visible. But this is not visible and probably not something people really think about.
MHAWISH: So much of what people go through remains invisible in Gaza. The world often sees images of destruction, of bombed buildings and crowded hospitals. But it rarely sits and sees the internal wreckage, the grief and the nightmares, the silence these children fall into, the exhaustion in people's eyes. Those things I'm very close to and I really relate to. And they don't make headlines.
I try to slow things down and really say to the world, this is what war does to the human spirit. And it was really difficult - and I'm saying this in the full sense of difficulty here - to not frame people in Gaza as victims, but to show the care and resilience that lives even in the hardest moments. These mental health workers, they're heroes in quiet ways. They don't carry weapons. They carry stories, they carry pain, they carry hope. And so they carry their entire community now through that trauma.
FADEL: Mohammed Mhawish is a journalist from Gaza City. You can read his story, "Treating Gaza's Collective Trauma," in The New Yorker. Thank you so much for your time and your work.
MHAWISH: Thank you so much for having me.
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