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A horrifying trauma - which must not be ignored!

"When I was last in Gaza, Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 per cent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." Dr Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30 children, all of them traumatized. He gave each pencil and paper and asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and of women streaming tears."

So writes John Pilger in a piece on ZNet. The above figures are truly horrifying - as is, equally, how the West is ignoring the plight of 1.4 million Palestinians. One doesn't have to be a rocket-scientist to see how people in the Middle East, and elsewhere around the globe, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, see the duplicity of the West when it speaks loudly, and often, about the 3000 people killed in the 9/11 attack - but does nothing to stop the strangehold on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The trauma unfolding in both areas will not either go away easily or the memory of it be quickly forgotten. We, in the West, have only ourselves to blame as we stand aside, mute, and see the tragedy in Gaza and the West Bank continue unabated.

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