Abood keeps asking the question no child should ever have to ask.
GAZA CITY — Every night since May 2024, Four-year-old Abood Mhjez sits in his grandfather’s tent with his mother, asking the same question: “Where is my dad?”
At first, when he asked, his mother told him, “He went to work. He’ll be back soon.” But she told Quds News Network that Abood kept overhearing relatives and friends saying things like, “Oh, the poor child, how will he ever forget his father?” and “May Allah have mercy on his father’s soul.”
“At that moment, he insisted one day that I tell him the truth,” she said.
“Where is my father?” Abood asked again.
“He went to Heaven, habibi. He will come back… or maybe we will go to him,” she told him.
“I was trembling. He doesn’t really understand what Heaven is. I was exhausted by his repeated questions. I was lost, and so was he,” Amani, Abood’s mother, added to Quds News Network.
But was Abood convinced? No.
“He kept staring at me, his eyes filled with tears and confusion. Habibi Abood was so attached to his father, he slept beside him every night and never ate until his father was there.”
“Okay… maybe we can go to him in Heaven. I miss him,” Abood told his mother.
His mother said Abood’s distress grows whenever he sees neighborhood children with their fathers or hears one of them say that their father will buy them something.
“He once came to me asking me to let his father buy him a three-wheeled car. He also insists on calling him on the phone so he ‘comes home now,’” she said.
Abood has been deprived of his childhood, of his father’s embrace and the ordinary life a child anywhere in the world should have.
Abood’s father was killed in an Israeli strike after the family was forcibly displaced from their home in the Sheikh Redwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
“He went to get us water and food, but he never returned. Friends later found his body in the street and told us, ‘Israel killed him.’ It was the harshest and most unimaginable news I could ever receive,” Amani said.
One of Thousands
The UN’s child protection agency, UNICEF, cited the Palestinian Health Ministry statistics from early September, recording 2,596 children who had lost both parents, and a further 53,724 who had lost either their father (47,804) or mother (5,920) since the start of the Israeli genocide.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) has called it “the largest orphan crisis in modern history.”
Left With Psychological Trauma
“Abood spends minutes at a time staring silently at the wall. He struggles to sleep and can no longer concentrate on even the simplest tasks. He forgets things I tell him almost immediately and cannot recall events that happened only moments earlier,” Amani told Quds News Network, explaining that her orphaned son has developed psychological trauma following Israel’s killing of his father.
The two-year Israeli onslaught on Gaza, marked by starvation, relentless bombardment, and ongoing displacement, all on top of nearly 17 years of blockade, has left thousands of children like Abood alone with their trauma. The psychological harm inflicted on this generation of Gaza’s children is incalculable, even for those who still have their families.
“Abood, like all children in Gaza, is terrified, angry, and unable to stop crying. Many adults are the same. This is far too much for adults to cope with, let alone children,” Amani added.
Dalia Talaa, a Gazan psychologist, said, “I wouldn’t even say that the mental health of children in Gaza has deteriorated, it has been obliterated. What we are seeing is complete psychological destruction after two years of Israeli extermination.”
Talaa noted that even before the assault, “children in Gaza were living with exceptionally poor mental health due to repeated Israeli attacks,” as well as the impacts of the blockade, including restrictions on freedom of movement, limited access to essential services, and economic collapse.
But now, she added, citing cases she saw, “the children have experienced a dramatic decline in their mental health, far worse than during previous offensives, manifesting in intense fear, anxiety, disordered eating, bedwetting, hypervigilance, and severe sleep disturbances, as well as behavioral changes such as aggression.”
Doa’a Saeed, a mother of three children, said, “Children in Gaza have experienced everything: the bombs, the deaths, the famine. They understand, feel and have seen everything. Now, my son can even tell what types of explosives are falling, he can hear the difference.”
“It is unacceptable that any child should contend with the horrors that those in Gaza have lived through. While dodging bombs and bullets, fleeing through streets littered with debris and corpses, being forced to sleep in the open air and going without the basic food and clean water they need to survive, children in Gaza are going through a period of mass-scale shock and grief,” Jason Lee, Save the Children’s Director for the occupied Palestinian territory, explained.
According to the World Health Organization, children in Gaza “exhibited symptoms of trauma, including emotional dysregulation, social withdrawal, grief, and worsening of pre-existing conditions. Common factors were displacement, loss of family members, physical injuries, and lack of mental health care resources” due to the Israeli genocide.
In June 2024, UNICEF estimated that almost all of Gaza’s 1.2 million children needed mental health and psychosocial support.
And the question remains, “Where is my dad?” — QNN
