Since the children are bombarded and starved by Gaza, we observe – powerless. What does it do as a society? | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

I In the past few months I have seen pictures on my phone screen that will follow me as long as I live. Dead, injured, hungry children and babies. Children who cry with pain and fear of their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. A little boy trembled from the trauma of an air raid. Scenes of unspeakable horror and violence that made me sick. Sometimes I skip these photos and videos, which may be afraid of what I see next. But mostly I feel forced to endure testimony.

I know I'm not alone. As many of us, which are privileged in our comfort and security, have seen the suffering of the children of Gaza through social media, pictures that are smiled and mixed with ads and pictures of other people. It makes the horror even more direct: this could be your children or my or a child you know, but for the lottery of the birth.

Many thousands of people have used their voice to comment on these children and their families, be it in letters from politicians, donations to charity organizations and aid organizations or on the streets. However, this war against children continues and there is an overwhelming feeling of fainting to help them. It is difficult to imagine how it can get worse, but worse with news this week that 14,000 babies suffer from severe acute malnutrition, according to UN. The reason is deliberate hunger: famine as a war weapon or, as Human Rights Watch puts it, a “exterior tool”.

This overarching feeling of impotence, when it is confronted with an unimaginable horror, creates a mass feeling of moral injury – a form of profound psychological stress that can happen to people if they are forced to act or not act in a way that opposes their values ​​or moral code directly. For the first time I came across the semester when I spoke to doctors who developed PTBs during the Pandemie. Doctors, nurses and nursing workers were in the fear of treating patients who were not always able to treat patients due to a lack of equipment, resources and leadership, and the mere volume of serious ill people.

Nowhere will this type of distress feel more than in the Gaza itself. For the medical specialists and helpers there, sadness, guilt, even betraying that they cannot help that everyone has to be a daily reality. If it is your job to help feed, treat, it is a deep trauma not to do this.

And for the parents of Gaza, it must be the most agonizing degree to see your child cry with hunger and not to feed it. I often think of the babies who were in the intensive care unit for newborns under bombing, the photo of the newborns in the Al-Shifa Hospital, which has put seven in a bed to keep them warm and alive. I am surprised by their mothers, many of whom have been forced to bring to the world without adequate pain relief and equipment. Where are you now? How many of them survived? And what did that do with the doctors who tried so much to save them?

But I also bothered myself about the effects of a moral injury by proxy and on the scale. I don't put it in any way with what people experience on site. But this feeling of fainting and as an extension, accomplice: What does it do to those around the world who feel what happens? What does the effects have if you observe such deep suffering yourself through a screen and do not feel able to act or force others to act?

I now understand why my mother stopped seeing the news after I was born. It was because she couldn't endure it. I also felt the temptation to look inside inwards since I had my son to coconve us in the warmth and security of our privileged life. But the Internet means that it is more difficult to loosen – the news is continuously parallel to our lives and erode the limits. There were many nights when I brought my son to bed, his stomach full of his pajamas clean and soft, and I silently cried for these other children who are not hidden in warm beds. In the early morning hours in which he would wake up for milk, I just had to go into the fridge and pour something to him, and we were sitting and listening to the noises of bombs, but to the Virt song that seemed to fill the sky.

The contrast between his security and your danger feels obscene for me. Could that be a kind of moral injury? It is something to be in the daily society of a small person – their innocence, their vulnerability, their silliness, their loving nature – that feels the pain of another child like a profound affront. But I know that you don't have to be a parent to feel the most visceral gazas children about what the children of Gaza is added. I think – or at least earlier – that it is anchored in us as humans to feel collective responsibility towards children and that this collective responsibility can go beyond the borders.

The feeling of feeling powerless in the face of such an incredible injustice can lead to a loss of trust or belief, not only in governments and institutions, but also in the moral order of the world and its ability to protect children. I wonder what the effects of this will be: Will, as certain politicians undoubtedly hope, lead to deafness that represents indifference? Traumatic events can lead to a lack of effects – millions of more people should march and increase their voice – but they can also be led into just anger.

I certainly feel a profound loss of faith. Something that I was true for humanity – that people are basically good, that we owe it to children to protect them – has shifted due to this conflict. I walk around with a feeling of the heavy one that I can't seem. Thousands of miles from the Gaza, I have changed in the past 18 months. I have learned that compassion for children has political limits for some people. What do you do with this terrible knowledge as soon as it sits in you like a Bleistein? I don't seem to find an answer.