WARNING: This story contains discussion of suicidal ideation
For months now, eight-year-old Sama Tabeel wakes up every morning in a tent camp in the southern Gaza Strip, picks up a broken piece of mirror, and looks at herself, praying that her hair has miraculously grown back.
Sama, who lives in a tent camp for displaced Palestinians west of Khan Younis, wears a pink bandana to cover her mostly bald head, after losing most of her hair suddenly, back in June.
“I wish I could put a hair-tie on my hair again and I wish I could go back to holding a brush and brushing my hair again,” she said.
“I miss brushing my hair so much.”
Her family — a brother, sister and parents — are among tens of thousands of people displaced in the area. On May 6, they were in the southern Gaza city of Rafah when Israeli forces entered, taking control of the crossing into Egypt.
The children were sleep when Israeli soldiers barged into the home, Sama said.
Her mother, Fattah Tabeel, says the family fled to a nearby hospital, but roughly 30 minutes after they arrived, its upper floor was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
“My daughter got so scared, she was panicking. The shrapnel and the strikes were very intense,” Fattah said.
Doctors said Sama’s hair loss was likely due to extreme fear, which caused her to go into a nervous shock, according to Fattah. She says her daughter remains scared, in particular because of the instability and lack of safety from being in a war zone and from constantly hearing ambulance sirens and nearby shellings.
“How can her hair grow back under these circumstances?”
Experts say it’s just one of many symptoms of psychological distress and trauma that hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are experiencing as a result of the ongoing Israeli bombardment on the besieged enclave.
Sama Tabeel, an eight-year-old girl, sits in a tent camp west of Khan Younis in Gaza, braiding the hair on her toy — something she can no longer do on herself after losing most of her hair. Tabeel was told by doctors that her hair fell out because she is living in a constant state of fear as Israeli airstrikes continue to target Gaza. She says she prays for her hair to grow back one day so she is able to brush it once again.
“The children of Gaza have experienced an unprecedented level of trauma,” said Dr. Abdul Basith, a Toronto-area emergency physician who was in Gaza for two weeks in March as a member of the emergency medical team with the World Health Organization (WHO).
He said the conditions there have an “incredibly profound” effect on children’s mental health.
Sama’s family waited till morning to leave the hospital and flee to Khan Younis. Over the next two days, as Sama brushed her hair, chunks of it fell out all at once.
“Almost all of her hair fell out,” Fattah said.
She says the hair loss left Sama unable to play with her friends, who would make fun of her.
“There was one instance where she came to me when she was screaming. The kids took her bandana off and were calling her ‘baldy,'” Fattah said. She says Sama now plays with her toys or colours on paper instead.
She says she and her husband did everything they could. They took Sama to several doctors to no avail. The treatment Sama requires is unavailable, and alternative treatments they tried showed no results.
“Yesterday, around 10 p.m., she was screaming. I asked her what’s wrong and she said ‘I want to die,'” Fattah said.
“I asked her ‘Why?’ She said ‘My birthday’s coming up and I won’t have hair.'”
‘I was deprived of my childhood’
Sama turns nine on Oct. 5, nearly a year into the Israel-Hamas war. She says she just wants her hair to grow back, so she can brush and braid it like she used to.
Despite living her entire life in blockaded Gaza and living in a war zone for close to a year, the hair loss crystallized the grief and hardship Sama has already endured at such a young age.
“I was deprived of my childhood,” she said, speaking in Arabic. “I am deprived of so much with this hair loss, I just want it to grow back again.”
According to a Save The Children report in March, “months of violence, displacement, starvation and disease on top of nearly 17 years of a blockade have caused relentless mental harm to children in Gaza.”
The non-profit group said at the time that the “support, services and tools they need to care for their children are further and further out of reach.”
The report said every person consulted said they witnessed a “dramatic deterioration” in the mental health of children, adding that the conditions in Gaza currently represent “text-book risk factors” for lasting mental harm.
The symptoms included “fear, anxiety, disordered eating, bedwetting” and sleep problems.
Israeli assaults have killed more than 41,467 Palestinians, wounded roughly 95,921 and displaced nearly the entire 2.3 million-strong population since the war began last fall, according to the latest figures supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry. The conflict followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, rampage in Israel, when its fighters killed 1,200 people and captured more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Stress and horror
Dr. Fozia Alvi, a family physician in Calgary, is also and president of Humanity Auxilium, a Canada-based network of volunteer physicians.
Since February, she says the non-profit organization has sent 36 doctors to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza, and “almost every doctor told me more or less [the] same stories of stress in children and horror that they’re facing.”
Alvi says children who undergo surgeries are often doing it without sufficient anesthesia “all while grappling with the psychological trauma of war.”
That trauma can have far-reaching effects.
“Not knowing if you’re going to live or die definitely makes these kids more prone to illness in the short term but also contracting chronic diseases in the long run,” said Basith, the emergency physician.
“If you take a step back, the real horror is that if they survive this genocide, if they grow up to be adults, then they have the fate of having to deal with the demons of the trauma for the rest of their lives.”
As for Sama, she says she hopes to one day be able to get rid of her pink bandana all together.
“God willing, when my hair comes back I will burn this bandana,” she said.
“I will burn it. I hate it. I wish my hair would grow back again and I could braid it.”