Peter Power: Gaza's traumatised children have lived through five wars already 

Through his work at Unicef, Peter Power has seen how children in Palestine struggle to cope with the psychological toll of living through war, and says every child deserves peace

One of the Palestinian children wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip being carried into hospital in Rafah last Monday. Picture: Hatem Ali/AP

As the Israel-Hamas escalation wages on, the barrage of hourly headlines chronicle facts and figures; numbers of the dead, percentage of critical infrastructure which has been levelled to the ground, rapidly dwindling supply counts. The conflict is so complex, so fast-moving, that numbers help us to make sense of an incomprehensible catastrophe.

As the international community anxiously await alerts and updates from the ground, the sheer volume and frequency of these has not allowed for the appropriate levels of focus on the grave psychological impact of the events following October 7th. These typically intangible, hard-to-quantify ramifications are as severe and longer lasting than the images of decimated buildings we have seen littered across front pages.