Providing first aid and psychosocial support to Palestinian children evacuated from Gaza to Egypt

Summary

Over one million children in Gaza are in desperate need of mental health support. They are traumatised by violence, injuries and displacement, and loss of family, schools and homes.

Save the Children, with funding from Community Jameel, is providing mental health and psychosocial support to Palestinian families evacuated to Egypt from Gaza with urgent medical needs.

This includes one-to-one counselling and training for community-based psychosocial support to help restore children’s mental wellbeing and hopes for the future.

Save the Children has reached thousands of Palestinians in Egypt with emergency medical care and mental health and psychosocial support, and will scale-up training to 16,000 Egyptian paramedics to help them save lives and children’s futures.

Transcript

Becky Platt, paediatric nurse, The Royal London Hospital

The psychological distress that I witnessed among children and young people is like nothing I had ever seen before.

They need a huge amount of mental health support.

These are children that have had their lives completely changed, and life today is completely unrecognisable from what it was before.

Tlaleng Mofokeng, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health

The health system in Gaza has been completely obliterated and the right to health has been decimated at every level.

Laila Toema, mental health and psychosocial support technical advisor, Save the Children – Egypt country office

We have been receiving or screening a lot of children who are seeking psychosocial support for them.

We noticed the anger, their inability to cope, also expressing their feelings about loss.

We have several layers of interventions on the Egypt side of the response.

The first part is related to working with governmental actors that are working closely with children.

For example, for the emergency medical teams working in the ambulance, to strengthen their ability to work with children coming from Gaza.

Also, we are working on developing community-based MHPSS [mental health and psychosocial support] interventions by raising the capacities of volunteers from the Palestinian community, so they can provide psychosocial support for new arrivals.

Also, we are providing individual and group psychosocial support for children and their caregivers that are coming from Gaza, and also for stranded Palestinians here.

Mohamed Moamen, former director of programmes operations, Save the Children – Egypt country office

What they have faced is devastating for any human being, let alone a child.

I think the biggest need for the children now is access to mental health and psychosocial support services.

Part of working on this is having access to education services and access to play.