The opening of the Olympic Games prompted UN Secretary-General António Guterres to call for global respect of the Olympic Truce – a custom of halting all hostilities from before to after the Games.
The desire for even a short term peace went unheeded as the latest news reports show.
A new UN report into alleged abuses carried out against thousands of Palestinians detained by the Israeli authorities since war erupted in Gaza last October has documented a range of serious violations that may amount to torture.
The trauma of these past months in Gaza and in any conflicts around the world will persist perhaps indefinitely for those who manage to survive.
In a recent study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), the CED – Centre for Demographic Studies, and the University of Washington examined the extent of conflict-related bereavement among immediate family members -parents and children- in a subset of countries experiencing high-intensity armed conflicts. The researchers also predicted how long and how intensely this bereavement is likely to persist in the population.
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, author and leader of the Kinship Inequalities Research Group at MPIDR explained:
“For every person killed, there are relatives and friends who survive and grieve those deaths. These survivors are impacted by these traumatic experiences for the rest of their lives.”
The study highlights the most lethal conflicts of the recent years: Syria, the State of Palestine, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.
“We find that these populations will experience considerable levels of bereavement regardless of how these conflicts evolve in the future,” says Alburez-Gutierrez.
“If we focus only on deaths, we overlook a vast part of the population scarred by the loss of loved ones. The number of mourners far exceeds the number of fatalities.”
For instance, on average, each conflict death leaves more than two relatives (parents and/or children) bereaved in Ukraine, more than 3.5 in the State of Palestine, and roughly four in Syria and in Afghanistan. By the end of 2023, an estimated one out of every 67 Palestinians had lost one offspring to the conflict over the course of their lives, one in every 20 individuals in Syria, in Afghanistan, one in every 65 individuals, and one in every 200 in Ukraine, on average.
The projections for the future reveal another crucial finding: high levels of bereavement will remain even if all armed conflicts were to end immediately.
“Looking ahead to 2050, even in a scenario in which there were no more conflict deaths after 2023, we estimate that one in every 142 Palestinians alive in 2050 will have ever experienced the death of one parent to conflict, and one in 200 the death of a child,” explained Emilio Zagheni, Co-author and Director of the MPIDR.
“In populations with high youth conflict mortality, such as in the State of Palestine, a significant number of bereaved parents aged 30 and older will carry the trauma of losing a child for the rest of their lives. In settings where combatant or older-age mortality is higher, such as in Ukraine, a large population of orphaned children will go through their lives with the scar of having lost a parent,”
“Longer and more lethal conflicts create larger populations of bereaved relatives. This has substantial negative impacts on the mental and physical health of survivors, reduces available emotional and economic support during critical life stages, and fosters adherence to extreme ideologies that hinder social and political reconciliation,” added Enrique Acosta, Co-author and researcher at the CED.
“Our estimates of the population of individuals left bereaved by war can help design policies to support different groups of mourners based on their gender and age. Tailoring interventions to the needs of specific demographic groups is crucial for effective support.”
Click on this link to access, The long-lasting effect of armed conflicts deaths on the living: Quantifying family bereavement, published in Science Advances.
The ‘Detention in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza’ report includes whistleblower accounts and Information from Israeli medical personnel. Injured detainees from Gaza “were held at a field hospital established in the Sde Teiman compound, where they were blindfolded at all times, their arms and legs shackled to their beds, and they were fed through a straw”.
At another prison in the Negev desert, one former prisoner alleged that he had been “frequently beaten in front of his son” who was also detained. Ill-treatment was “widespread”, particularly in military-run detention facilities, the OHCHR report maintained.
The trauma of the bereaved, the tortured, the abused, and the detained, will remain with them for the rest of their lives.
Fiona Grahame