Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – In the narrow alleyways of the Dheisheh refugee camp, three children debate which of their encounters with the Israeli military is worth telling, and who gets to tell it.
Yanal, 14, wins the opening round 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 complex,” he says, because, as he explains, there is nowhere to run away to when the army comes.
Yanal keeps returning to one memory: a football match, soldiers entering the field, and there being no way out.
Mustafa Abu Aliyah, 13, counters with a raid that he ran into as he was on his way to his grandfather’s house. The Israeli army fired live rounds and tear gas, he says. “We were in the middle of the fire.”
He can’t remember his first encounter with soldiers, “but I definitely saw them when I was little, because they are always coming here”.
His sister Diyar, 12, was mid-piano lesson the last time the army came through.
“Whenever the army comes, there will be tear gas,” she says. “People will be beaten. There’s usually someone injured or killed.”
She compares it to life elsewhere. “I see children in other countries, in other worlds, living in safety, but we can’t even leave our front door without suffering.”
The raids happen so often that the children often can’t remember the dates of specific incidents. But what they do remember is the fear they experienced and the aggression displayed by the Israeli soldiers.
In the first nine months of 2025 alone, Israeli forces carried out nearly 7,500 raids across the occupied West Bank, or about 27 a day, and a 37 percent increase compared with the same period in 2024.
‘Essence of childhood destroyed’
The children in the Dheisheh refugee camp reflect a wider pattern of childhood experiences under Israeli occupation, set out in a 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, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”, it found that Israeli forces have killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children and wounded more than 44,000 across the occupied territory, most of them in Gaza – where it said that the deliberate targeting of children constituted part of the genocide in the Palestinian territory.
The report also documents a pattern of killings, mass arrests, torture, sexual violence and attacks on schools and hospitals.
In the West Bank, it records a sharp rise in settler violence against children and killings by Israeli forces, among them a two-year-old girl shot dead in January 2025. Children, the report notes, are held in Israeli detention, with no lawyer and no word sent to their parents, a separation it says can amount to enforced disappearance. Schools, too, are targets: 85 across the West Bank are under demolition or stop-work orders, and others have been closed or attacked by soldiers and settlers.
Beyond the casualty count
The UN commission argues that Israel has created conditions in which Palestinians live in a constant state of “diffused, ambient terror, that does not require constant bombing to remain effective”.
“We are talking about repeated shocks, about continuous events that never end,” says Lemis Farraj, a psychologist and the project coordinator at Shorouq in Dheisheh, emphasising that a child’s physical and mental health cannot be separated from each other.
The report calls this continuous traumatic stress, distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), because there is no single event to recover from. The danger does not just come from experiencing one raid, but from the fear that comes with waiting for the expected raids that will likely come in the future.
Diyar explains that when the army enters her neighbourhood, she has to stay home and wait, no matter what her plans were. “Our life stops,” she says.
Her brother, Mustafa, says that the repetition has worn the fear flat.
“When I see the army, I [am] used to it and I stop being afraid.”
Farraj sees the same in the young children she treats: a startle at an ordinary sound, certainty that a raid has begun, and regression – skills already learned suddenly lost again.
Five-year-old Khour Hammad, who lives a few alleys away from the older children, has experienced the same raids.
She explains that both of her parents are in prison. Israeli forces arrested her father in July 2023 and her mother last March, according to the family.
Khour remembers the night the army came for her mother. Half-asleep, she heard a man’s voice and thought her father had finally come home. She climbed out of bed expecting him. Instead, she found soldiers inside the house.
The soldiers tried to question Khour. She says that she “felt like I was going to throw up”.
Handed an old family photo, she brightens at once, pointing out her mother, Islam Amarna, and her father, Osama Hammad, and rattling off memories in bursts.
Generational trauma
While Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank face different lived experiences, the UN finds the same cause behind the harm: a military occupation described as a “long-term mechanism of domination, subjugation and oppression”.
Farraj adds that children are affected not only by their own experiences of trauma, 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,” she says, referring to the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.
The report similarly notes that Palestinian refugees, now in their fifth generation, have internalised a sense of “dispossession from the Nakba” alongside present-day experiences of occupation.
In the West Bank, roughly one in four Palestinians are refugees; in Gaza, it is about 70 percent.
Israeli violence and forcible displacement have been carried through generations of Palestinians, compounding as the cycle repeats. Farraj says trauma recovery depends on stability: family support, schooling, safe spaces and a predictable routine, all of which remain precarious under Israel’s occupation.
For Khour, that stability begins with her parents.
“I want the whole world to listen and see my picture,” Khour says, “and get my mom and dad out of prison.”
