'Unlike anything': A year of collective grief for Palestinians in US over Gaza

The emotions can quickly go from rage to resentment, to guilt and then back again - and they haven’t let up.

This is what's being referred to as a cycle of collective grief. 

Palestinians in the West have long been intimately familiar with the impact of the Israeli occupation of their homeland.

But the assault on Gaza since 7 October 2023 - and later the West Bank and Lebanon, which houses almost a million Palestinian refugees, has left a gaping mental and emotional wound that many are unsure will ever heal.  

Psychiatry professor at the University of California San Francisco, Jess Ghannam, has studied the Palestinian experience in comparison to that of Iraqi children after multiple invasions, as well as Muslims in the post-9/11 era, and described it as “unlike anything”. 

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