In Gaza, destruction is inescapable—hospitals flattened, schools reduced to rubble, families sheltering beneath plastic sheets. Less visible, but no less consequential, is another kind of ruin: the psychological harm that Israeli blockades, periodic bombardment, and, most acutely, the latest Israel-Hamas war have inflicted on an entire generation of Palestinians. It is this damage that will determine the region’s long-term stability and prospects for peace.
The loss of safety, opportunity, and a sense of normalcy have shaped how young Palestinians regulate emotions and think about the future. Anxiety, depression, and despair are widespread among adolescents; left unaddressed, this latent damage will outlast any cease-fire or physical reconstruction, embedding fragility into the social foundations of Palestinian society.
In Gaza, destruction is inescapable—hospitals flattened, schools reduced to rubble, families sheltering beneath plastic sheets. Less visible, but no less consequential, is another kind of ruin: the psychological harm that Israeli blockades, periodic bombardment, and, most acutely, the latest Israel-Hamas war have inflicted on an entire generation of Palestinians. It is this damage that will determine the region’s long-term stability and prospects for peace.
The loss of safety, opportunity, and a sense of normalcy have shaped how young Palestinians regulate emotions and think about the future. Anxiety, depression, and despair are widespread among adolescents; left unaddressed, this latent damage will outlast any cease-fire or physical reconstruction, embedding fragility into the social foundations of Palestinian society.
Our research at RAND on Palestinian youth in the West Bank and East Jerusalem offers a warning about where Gaza may be headed. In 2014, nearly half of the young people that we surveyed between the ages of 15 and 24 reported personally experiencing political violence, which we define as direct harm or coercion by Israeli soldiers or police—such as being assaulted, shot, imprisoned, or having one’s home or a family member’s home demolished. More than 70 percent of those surveyed reported witnessing such acts or hearing about them occurring in their community.
Our study found that exposure to this violence, whether direct or indirect, was strongly associated with emotional distress and an increase in risky, self-destructive behaviors such as drug use and engagement in interpersonal violence. Young people living near Israeli checkpoints or settlements consistently reported worse mental health in 2014 than those living farther away, even when they had not personally experienced direct confrontations with Israeli soldiers or settlers. This suggests that the daily routines of waiting, surveillance, humiliation, and restriction associated with occupation impose a chronic psychological toll.
What we and other researchers have documented in the West Bank and East Jerusalem should be a warning: If those patterns were present in 2014, then they are likely even more pronounced in those areas today, and worse still in Gaza. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in late 2023, relentless bombardment, mass displacement, and the near-total collapse of civilian life have accelerated and intensified psychological harm, compressing lifetimes of unimaginable trauma into mere months or even weeks.
Today, Gaza’s 2 million residents—roughly half of them children—continue to live under threat of bombardment and fighting as the current cease-fire barely holds. This kind of pervasive political violence erases ordinary routines and reshapes human development, often resulting in destructive coping behaviors.
Gender shapes how this distress is expressed. While young women reported higher levels of depression, anxiety, and isolation in our study, young men were more likely to externalize pain through anger or confrontation. Both described hidden or stigmatized behaviors such as alcohol and substance use as “small acts of freedom”—attempts to reclaim control in lives defined by restriction. These patterns underscore how risky behavior in conflict environments often stems from constrained agency.
Traditionally, faith, family, and community institutions have buffered young Palestinians from the worst psychological effects of conflict. But in Gaza, those protective layers have largely eroded. Schools have been destroyed or shuttered, youth clubs have disappeared, and families have been fragmented by death and displacement. What remains is a treacherous mix of individual suffering and social unraveling.
If this crisis is left unresolved, the consequences will unfold predictably. Gaza will emerge from war not just with shattered infrastructure but with a generation that is ill-equipped to sustain recovery. Political institutions, whether reformed or newly created, will struggle to gain legitimacy because young people will associate authority with coercion or neglect. Civic participation will remain shallow, trust fragile. Over time, untreated trauma will increase the appeal of rigid ideologies and armed networks that offer identity or protection where civilian life does not.
Armed networks tend to actively exploit this trauma, casting themselves as protectors or providers in communities where governance has collapsed by offering money, belonging, and purpose to young people who feel abandoned. Youth shaped by chronic insecurity and the absence of civilian role models are especially vulnerable to such appeals. Over time, the recruitment process blurs the boundary between survival and ideology, entrenching violence and complicating long-term recovery.
Similar patterns have appeared elsewhere. In Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, years of war left disillusioned youth vulnerable to movements that promised inclusion and validation. These cases demonstrate how, without credible institutions and recovery, trauma and instability can turn a generation’s search for meaning into renewed cycles of violence.
This does not make violence inevitable, but it makes nonviolent politics harder to sustain as a familiar cycle takes hold: reconstruction without social repair, governance without legitimacy, and periodic violence that resets progress. In Gaza, the scale of collapse magnifies these risks. Health systems lie in ruins. Malnutrition remains at extraordinarily high levels. Hundreds of thousands of children are growing up without formal education. Mental health services, scarce even before the war, have effectively disappeared.
That is why international policymakers and multilateral institutions must give Gaza’s social foundations the same attention as its physical infrastructure. Youth rehabilitation is a strategic investment in regional stability, and immediate action is essential even if a lasting peace has not yet been achieved.
Without a sustained cease-fire, humanitarian actors can admittedly do little beyond trying to shield civilians from immediate danger, maintaining limited emergency services, and preparing for more comprehensive recovery once conditions allow. Relief efforts today remain constrained: Sporadic aid convoys deliver food and medical supplies, a handful of hospitals and mobile clinics operate despite shortages, and local volunteers offer brief psychosocial support in shelters. With schools destroyed or occupied, informal and radio lessons have replaced classrooms. These fragments of care help sustain life, but they cannot yet evolve into real recovery.
However, once a durable cease-fire has been established, it must be accompanied by a push to rebuild and restructure social support systems that are essential to youth development, bolstering the foundations of civil society and nurturing a generation equipped to pursue and sustain long-term peace. For this to happen, donor governments and aid agencies must determine how to deliver psychosocial support, health care, and education where these systems no longer exist. That may mean setting up temporary classrooms, mobile health units, and safe community spaces, as well as training Palestinian teachers, counselors, and volunteers to help lead these efforts so that support feels credible and close to home.
Furthermore, trained health care workers will be needed to offer confidential counseling for those coping with trauma, while community organizations should run peer‑support groups, family outreach, and youth programs. Approaches used in post‑conflict settings such as Bosnia and Rwanda—community‑based psychosocial support, school‑centered recovery, youth reintegration that combines counseling and employment opportunities, and integration of mental health into primary care—can offer useful guidance, though any program must be tailored specifically to the situation in Gaza.
It is crucial that those who best understand how trust is repaired and opportunity is created—Palestinian educators, youth workers, women’s groups, and religious leaders—guide how institutions are rebuilt for the long term, with international partners providing resources, training, and political backing rather than control. Stability will come only when these local systems can sustain themselves and give the next generation a real stake in the future.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often framed in territorial or diplomatic terms, focused on borders, sovereignty, and political negotiation. Yet its most enduring consequences may be social and behavioral. Evidence from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza, points to a clear conclusion: The politics of violence cannot be separated from policies of human development. Rebuilding human capacity should be a prerequisite to achieving stability, not merely a follow-up measure. If this generation’s trauma is ignored, then even the most carefully negotiated political agreements will rest on foundations that are already fatally fractured.
