The psychological effects on society

“The effects on the civilian population in war are important: the experience of vulnerability and danger, helplessness and terror can deeply mark the psyche of people, particularly children. The spectacle of rapes or torture, of murders or mass executions, of bombings and razing of entire towns is almost by necessity traumatizing,” wrote the social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró in his work Social psychology of war, trauma and therapy.

In interview with Excelsior, Naief Yehya, author of books such as Propaganda and warspoke about the repercussions that war conflicts leave on people who are left in the crossfire, regarding the violence that escalated since October 7 between Israel and the pro-Palestinian group Hamas.

The consequences of war are always serious, especially among children, who do not have the minimum professional support. But in this case it is much worse because the population of Gaza has been living in a state of isolation equivalent to internment in a concentration camp since 2006.

*Naief Yehya, specialist.

The majority of the population of the strip, around 70%, arrived there as exiles, escaping the war in 1948, when the Nakba (which is the catastrophe of being stripped of their land by the newly founded nation of Israel) took place. ). The trauma is immense for these true captives who have nowhere to go,” said Yehya.

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In addition, Regarding the state of the residents of regions such as the Gaza Strip and its surroundings, who live in a state of alert, the writer stated:

It is one of constant terror and anguish. It is practically unimaginable for us to be in such a condition of permanent threat in which the occupying army decides how many calories of food can enter the strip. On the one hand, the population suffers from the leadership of Hamas, which came to power in 2006, which is a fundamentalist, fanatical and corrupt organization that believes in violence as the only alternative to the occupation (it should be mentioned that the Palestinians have tried many other options for peaceful rebellion and have always been repressed with immense brutality), and the Israeli army that collectively punishes the population, bombs, selectively murders, destroys homes and crops. “It is a population without any protection.”

For the GazansComments the journalist, “forced displacement is another enormous trauma, since their parents and grandparents lost everything in the war and came to live in overcrowding, misery and abandonment. Even if they have the opportunity to flee elsewhere, most will not do so for fear of losing that land, which is the only thing they have left.”

*Sweet broom, psychologist.

For her part, the psychologist Dulce María Escobar Cruz, from the Addiction Prevention Center Dr. Héctor Ayala Velázquez shared that people in war zones “develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which causes damage to the brain, because parts such as the amygdala or the prefrontal cortex are compromised. due to the constant and atypical load of substances such as adrenaline, cortisol or serotonin.”

Due to this factor, The specialist points out that “Those who suffer conflicts like the one in the Middle East, or even those who are hostages, can develop memory problems, hypervigilance, anxiety and verbal alexithymia, which is the inability of people to recognize and express their emotions, precisely because the trauma of a war It is very big and something that is not easy for a person to understand. It is harmful stress.”

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*mcam