Trying to cure the trauma of Israeli raids on the occupied west coast | Israel-Palestine News of Conflict

Jenin and Tulkarem, occupied the west coast “Omaim Faraj lays her head in silence for a moment,” she is tired, but the job doesn’t stop.

She arrives at a school -facing school near Tulkarem, where her first patient, an elderly displaced woman who gently greets her, waits for her to measure glucose and blood pressure. He then moved to the next classroom, the next patient, walking down an open passage soaked in the sun in late February.

Faraj, 25, volunteered to help the inhabitants of Israeli raids devastated for several weeks. She is one of the young Palestinians working to solve the ambulance Israel creates on the occupied west coast as she attacks refugee camps and moves thousands.

Hurrying in danger

When Israeli military occupation and displacement of the camp In what the Israelites began calling the Operation “Iron Wall”, on January 21, Faraj rushed to the camp instead of running away from violence.

She stayed there with her fellow volunteers for more than 12 critical days, when the attacks were on their fiercest and people were still trying to organize themselves to escape from the camp.

They focused on providing assistance to people in need – injured, elderly and people with limited mobiles. No one could come to the hospital because Israeli soldiers did not allow them.

Israeli soldiers harassed volunteers, Faraj recounts, describing how to threaten her and her colleagues, telling them to leave and never return or be shot.

One incident particularly persecutes her, an elderly man who had been trapped in his house for four days.

The team was constantly trying to reach him, but Israeli soldiers blocked their way. Finally, the Red Cross International Committee intervened, coordinating with the Israelis to enable the safe passage of volunteers.

When they reached the man, he was in a terrible strait – he lacked food, water and hygiene for four days, but finally managed to evacuate him.

As they left, they were sent, warned that they were not returning – or risked to be shot.

Backpack medicines

“We didn’t have an emergency plan for that,” says Alaa Souji, director of Al-Awda Center in Tulkarem.

Al-Awda and Lajee Camp at the Aida camp in Bethlehem are trained by volunteers to document the expulsion of people and the camp conditions so that they can evaluate the necessary help.

Volunteers are about 15 mostly nurses and doctors who gathered when they started Israeli raids, to provide medical assistance and distribute the basics of the thousands who were saved.

Their young faces show a tribute of almost two months of non -As -stop to people who are displaced by Israeli attack on Nur Shams and Tulkarem camps.

They struggle to fulfill the huge gap that Israel banned the Palestinian refugee agency of the United Nations (UNRWA) to help people on the occupied west coast.

These volunteers have no seat, spending all day walking around to serve people without any backpacks and determination.

They go to one of the 11 temporary, rush to shelters or wherever their patients were able to find a place to live.

They bring medical and psychological support, and also clothes, food and other supplies to those who lost everything in Israel’s attacks by soldiers.

In their backpacks are gauze, portable monitors of glucose, gloves, bandages, tournaments, handicrafts of blood pressure, notebooks and pencils.

“Our role of local community is so important,” Alaa says.

Volunteers also have to support themselves emotionally, maintaining group sessions to cope with work collection in their devastated communities.

Many of them are from the camp, so they were also displaced, targeted and saw their districts expressed by Israeli bulldozers.

Faraj is no different. Like many Palestinians, it was marked by loss and violence after her 18-year-old brother killed Israeli drone in January 2024.

The camp is a zone without starting. Some displaced inhabitants risk returning to their homes to try to retrieve some of their belongings.

They move the streets filled with ruins, the stench of rotten foods left behind in abandoned houses, and the sewage is torn from bulldozer, while Israeli soldiers patrol and drones hover over their heads, looking for movement inside the camp.

Laughter, crying, screaming trauma

The hour of tulcarema is an hour of driving is Jenin, and 10 minutes from Jenin is a village called Kafr Dan, where the unusual sound filters in the air – a kid’s laughter.

About 20 children wander around the garden of a large house. They are collected in a rough circle by a coach who encourages them to speak – loud – to release their fear and anger.

The activity organizes Jenin’s Freedom Theater, which came to Kafr Dan to give this moment of respite that the displaced children were simply for a moment.

They started at the Jenin camp as a space where children and young people could participate in cultural activities, but the Israeli army blocked to be there.

So, “We bring the theater to the children,” says Shatha Jarrar, one of the three activity coordinates.

Children are encouraged to be as loud as they want, to scream from fear and anger they hold inside The violence to which they were exposed.

The next game is a small ball balanced on a spoon, and the children laugh again and their mothers who watch them smiling, happy to see their children happy.

Sitting side by side is Muhammad, 67, who brought some of the children to join the activities.

She is not her children, however, because she offered a family refuge in her home of seven years recently displaced from Jenin.

The Um of Muhammad was displaced in 2002, during the second intifada, her home at the Jenin refugee camp that destroyed Israeli forces when her three were few.

Now they are older, she says, her eyes tucked as she remembered the trauma of displacement. They have their own children, and she is a grandmother.

Mind Muhammad knows too well the fear of Israeli tanks that are inserted and the explosions echo. That is why, now, it insists on helping people who go through the same thing.

Shatha, 26, and her two co -organizers begin to put their equipment, storing it in backpacks. Activities are done for today.

Shatha became aware of the Freedom Theater when she attended the program as a child and later decided to devote her time to the inheritance of the theater.

“Theater is a different world and lifestyle. My work with children is part of this world. The children are our tomorrow,” she says.

Nearby is a mother – who prefers to reject her name more – who watched her children.

She, her husband and two children lived through the Distopian scene of Israeli drones of four -leggedrs who were blowing the evacuation orders. Then came Apache helicopters who float in the sky, attacks of drones and fleet of armored vehicles in which she attacked, accompanied by hard -armed Israeli soldiers.

Her eyes expanded, her speech accelerates, memories fresh as she tells her story.

Finally, as they left, they had to stand as the Israeli soldiers scored their faces and arrested some men trying to leave.

When they first left, she endured hope that they would be allowed in a few days.

But the reality of their shift is slowly being housed.