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Bethlehem, taken from the West Bank – In the small streets of the Dheisheh refugee camp, three children argue about what they will encounter with the Israeli soldiers who should be told, and who should be told.
Yanal, 14, has won the inaugural competition on language skills alone. He speaks three languages: Arabic, English and Spanish, and insists on telling his story in English.
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“Life in the camp is difficult,” he says, because, as he explains, there is nowhere to go when the army comes.
Yanal still remembers one memory: the football game, the soldiers entering the stadium, and there is no way out.
Mustafa Abu Aliyah, 13 years old, fought off the terrorists he encountered while visiting his grandmother’s house. Israeli soldiers fired tear gas all around, he says. “We were under fire.”
He does not remember his first meeting with the soldiers, “but I saw them when I was young, because they always come here”.
His sister Diyar, 12 years old, was taking piano lessons the last time the soldiers passed by.
“Every time the soldiers come, there is tear gas,” he said. People will be beaten and often someone will be injured or killed.
He compares it to life elsewhere. “I see children in other countries, in other countries, living in safety, but we cannot leave our home without suffering.”
Crimes happen so often that children often cannot remember the dates of the actual events. But what he remembers is that he was afraid and brutalized by the Israeli soldiers.
In the first nine months of 2025 alone, the Israeli military did about 7,500 attacks across the West Bank, or about 27 per day, an increase of 37 percent compared to the same period in 2024.
‘Childhood ruined’
The children in the Dheisheh refugee camp reflect many of the experiences of childhood during the Israeli occupation. report The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released on Tuesday.
It examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since October 2023.
Titled, “Childhood’s Values Destroyed”, it found that Israeli forces killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children and injured more than 44,000 in the occupied territories, most of them in Gaza – where they said the targeting of children was part of Genocide in the Palestinian Territories.
The report also describes killings, mass arrests, torture, sexual violence and attacks on schools and hospitals.
In the West Bank, it shows a sharp increase in violence against children and killings by Israeli soldiers, among them a two-year-old girl who was shot dead. January 2025. The children, the report says, are held in Israeli prisons, without a lawyer and no word is sent to their parents, a separation they say can amount to forced disappearance. Schools, too, are targets: 85 across the West Bank are being vandalized or suspended, and others have been closed or attacked by soldiers and settlers.
Over the number of casualties
The UN committee says that Israel has created conditions in which the Palestinian people are always “horrible, terrible, which does not mean that the bombs will always continue to work”.
Lemis Farraj, a psychologist and project director at Shorouq in Dheisheh, said: “We are talking about repeated shocks, about continuous events that never end.”
The report calls it post-traumatic stress disorder, different from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), because there is no single event to recover from. The threat does not come from a single attack, but from the fear that comes with anticipating future attacks.
Diyar explains that when the soldiers enter his area, he has to stay at home and wait, no matter what they want. He said: “Our life stops.
His brother, Mustafa, says the repetition has caused fear.
“When I see an army, I get used to it and I stop being scared.”
Farraj sees the same thing in the young children he treats: startle at a simple word, the certainty that an attack has begun, and relapse – the skills he learned earlier are lost again.
Five-year-old Khour Hammad, who lives far away from the older children, also faced the same attacks.
He explains that both his parents are in prison. Israeli forces arrested his father in July 2023 and his mother last March, according to the family.
Khour remembers the night the soldiers came looking for her mother. While he was sleeping, he heard someone’s voice and thought that his father had come home. He got out of bed waiting for her. Instead, he found soldiers inside the house.
The soldiers tried to question Khour. He said that he “felt like I was going to give up”.
When presented with an old family photo, she immediately lights up, pointing to her mother, Islam Amarna, and her father, Osama Hammad, in a flash of memory.
The agony of a generation
Despite the fact that Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank are facing different situations, the UN finds the same cause of harm: the military occupation described as “a long-term method of domination, conquest and oppression”.
Farraj adds that children are affected not only by their own traumatic experiences, but also by what is passed down from parents and grandparents.
“The first generation of the Nakba lived in shock and passed it on to their children,” he says, referring to the ethnic cleansing of about 750,000 Palestinians after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
The report also states that Palestinian refugees, now in their fifth generation, have entered the midst of the “Nakba withdrawal” along with the current labor situation.
In the West Bank, about one in four Palestinians are refugees; in Gaza, it is about 70 percent.
Israeli violence and forced deportations have been carried out through generations of Palestinians, intensifying as the cycle repeats itself. Farraj says recovery from trauma depends on stability: family support, education, a safe environment and a sense of identity, all of which remain dangerous under the Israeli occupation.
For Khour, that stability starts with her parents.
Khour said: “I want the whole world to listen and see my picture, and to release my mother and father from prison.”
