Helping Children Heal: Psychosocial Support in Gaza

There is a moment our facilitators watch for in every new group of children. It usually comes in the second or third session, in the middle of a game — a child who arrived silent and watchful suddenly laughs, loudly, without checking the room first. The facilitators call it ‘the return.’ It is the sound of a child remembering, for a moment, that they are a child.

Fight for Palestine’s psychosocial support program is built to make room for that moment, and then to make it ordinary again. Across nine child-friendly spaces in displacement sites, our trained facilitators currently work with around 1,100 children each week — through play, art, story, and above all, routine.

Why play is serious work

It can seem strange, amid urgent material needs, to fund football games and drawing sessions. But decades of humanitarian experience are unambiguous: children process difficult experiences through play the way adults process them through talk. A child who cannot say what they carry can often draw it, act it out with puppets, or slowly set it down over weeks of structured games with a trusted adult present.

Our program follows established psychosocial support practice: it is not therapy, and our facilitators are not therapists. It is the deliberate rebuilding of the conditions in which children naturally recover — safety, predictability, expression, friendship, and adults who show up on time, every time. For the smaller number of children who need specialized care, our facilitators are trained to recognize the signs and refer them onward with their families’ consent.

Our thirty-two facilitators are recruited from the displaced communities themselves — former teachers, youth workers, and older siblings with a gift for it — and complete a structured training in psychosocial first aid, group facilitation, and child safeguarding before they ever lead a session. They also meet weekly for their own supported debrief, because adults who pour out steadiness all day need somewhere to refill it. Caring for the carers is not an extra. It is how the program stays safe.

A morning at a child-friendly space

Nine o’clock: circle time, the same greeting song every day — sameness is the medicine. Then rotations: a movement game outside, an art table, a story corner where a facilitator reads with the unhurried voice of someone who has nowhere better to be, which is precisely the message.

Watch closely and the structure reveals itself. The games are chosen to rebuild cooperation and turn-taking. The art prompts are open-ended but gently sequenced. Even cleanup is part of the design: children who put away crayons together are practicing a world in which things go back where they belong.

Each space runs morning and afternoon shifts, six days a week, with groups capped at a size where every facilitator can hold every child in view — not for discipline, but for attention. Being noticed is half the program. A facilitator who says ‘you drew a boat yesterday — will you finish it today?’ has told a child something displacement tries daily to unteach: you are seen, you are remembered, your things and your plans carry over from one day to the next.

The drawings tell the story

Facilitators keep an eye on the art table, not to analyze children, but because drawings are how children talk when words are too heavy. In a child’s first weeks, the pictures often speak for themselves, and we will not describe them here. Children’s pain is not ours to display.

What we can describe is the change. Week by week, color returns to the pages. Houses reappear, then gardens, then absurd wonderful things — a cat the size of a bus, a football stadium on the moon. Ten-year-old Salma, who barely spoke when she arrived, recently spent a session drawing an elaborate bakery ‘for when I grow up.’ She has now assigned jobs in it to half her group. She will be the boss, obviously.

We measure our work in ordinary things. A child who sleeps through the night. A child who argues about football. A child who makes plans for next week. Ordinariness is the victory.

Supporting the parents too

A child’s recovery runs through the adults around them, and those adults are carrying their own weight. Alongside the children’s sessions, we host weekly parent circles — part practical guidance on supporting children through distress, part simple respite among people who understand without explanation.

Caregivers tell us these circles change the home more than anything we do with the children directly. A mother who learns that her son’s nightmares are a normal response to abnormal events stops fearing that something in him is broken. That release of fear is felt by every person in the tent.

The circles have also become something we did not design: a place where parents plan. One group organized a rotating childcare arrangement so mothers could attend clinic days. Another petitioned our water team for a tap stand nearer their block — successfully. Give people a mat, a kettle, and a reliable hour together, and community begins reassembling itself. We take no credit for that. We just keep bringing the kettle.

Help a child come back to childhood

This program runs on modest things: crayons and paper, footballs, storybooks, facilitator stipends and training, mats and shade cloth. None of it is expensive. All of it, together, buys back childhoods.

Your support currently keeps nine spaces open and 1,100 children in weekly sessions, with two more spaces planned this spring. Somewhere today, in a tent with paper on the floor, a silent child is one session closer to laughing without checking the room first. Thank you for holding that door open.