Content warning: this article includes details about the impact of conflict on children in war zones and descriptions of injuries that some readers may find distressing.
The first thing was that Abdelrahman's dad was killed. The family home was struck by an Israeli air strike. The boy's mum, Asma al-Nashash, 29, remembers that 'they brought him out in pieces.'
Then on 16 July 2024 an air strike hit the school in Nuseirat, central Gaza. Eleven-year-old Abdelrahman was seriously wounded. Doctors had to amputate his leg.
His mental state began to deteriorate. 'He started pulling his hair and hitting himself hard,' Asma recalls. 'He became like someone who has depression, seeing his friends playing and running around… and he's sitting alone.'
When I meet Abdelrahman at a hospital in Jordan in May 2025, he is withdrawn and wary. Dozens of children have been evacuated to the Kingdom from Gaza for medical treatment.
'We will return to Gaza,' he tells me. 'We will die there.'
Abdelrahman is one of thousands of traumatised children I've met in my nearly four decades of reporting on conflicts. Certain faces are embedded in my memory. They reflect the depth of terror inflicted on children in our time.
The first was on a hilltop in Eritrea in the mid-1980s. Adonai Mikael was a child victim of an Ethiopian napalm strike, crying in agony as the wind blew dust on to his wounds. The cries, the expression of pure agony in his eyes sent me fleeing from the tent where he was being treated.
In Belfast a few years later, I remember a boy following the coffin of his father, blown up by the IRA. Never before had I seen such a distance in anyone's eyes.
In Sierra Leone during the civil war, there was the girl whose hands were hacked off by a drunken militiaman; from Soweto there is the image of a child helping her mother mop the blood of a murder victim on their doorstep; and in Rwanda the boy who broke down when I asked him why the other children called him 'Grenade' – a moment of insensitivity I will always regret.
The sheer scale of the crisis is staggering. In 2024, 520 million children were living in conflict zones - one in every five children worldwide, according to an analysis by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, which pieced together conflict records with population data to arrive at this estimate.
Trauma has long-lasting implications for mental and physical health. Prof Theresa Betancourt warns that trauma can affect 'the developing architecture of the brain in young children, with lifelong consequences for learning, behaviour, and both physical and mental health.'
This need for urgent mental health support, preventative measures, and community stabilization is crucial. In regions like Gaza, where the threat of violence is persistent, the burden of trauma often weighs heaviest on the young, requiring immediate and comprehensive psychological care.
