"Boooom boom" were the two words that Salma Musleh, a two-year-old girl, kept reiterating in the temporary house of her family who took shelter at Nasser neighborhood in northern Gaza City.
The little girl and her family were forced to flee their home in a residential complex in Beit Lahiya, a town in northern Gaza Strip where Israel intensified airstrikes and sent columns of tanks into.
The words "Boooom Boom" imitate the sound of Israeli F-16 warplanes and tank shells that have been bombing Gaza Strip since Dec. 27, when the Operation Cast Lead started with the aim of stopping Palestinian militants from firing rockets into its border communities.
"She was very terrified with the loud sound of the blasts," said the girl's mother Yasmin Musleh. "We finally overcome this problem by letting her deal with the sound as a game. Whenever we hear a missile being fired, we let her imitate the sound in advance."
In the course of the operation, the Israeli F-16 jets, Apache helicopters and drones hit the houses of Palestinian militant activists, mosques, government installations and open areas.
As Israel started a ground incursion into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Jan. 3, artillery and marine bombardment joined in the aerial onslaught.
The ongoing Israeli operation into Gaza was the most violent one since the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem.
The conflicts have killed 250 children and 93 women out of the 824 deaths, said Gaza emergency chief Mo'aweya Hassanein, adding that the death toll is still mounting.
The bloody war has traumatized the Gaza children, hurting both the body and the heart of them.
Yassin, 33, a Palestinian paramedic who works for the Palestinian Red Crescent, said that he found a five-year-old girl from al-Samouny family in Zeitoon neighborhood in southern Gaza City after she spent four days hugged by the stiff arms of her dead mother.
Dr. Iyad al-Sarraj, a well-known Gaza psychologist, says that the case of Salma is called "acting out," in which children get over their fears by perceiving them as a game.
But in other cases, children link the sound of explosions, the horrible images of dead bodies they see on the television and the consequent fear they notice on their parents.
"By linking these three facts, the children suffer from various forms of problems, including involuntary urination, less appetite, less sleep, being terrified by any loud sound and this also keeps the children attached to their mother," Dr. Sarraj added, warning that this will make the children's future acts hostile.
Dr. Sarraj also said that the Israeli acts would push the children closer to the armed Palestinian groups. "When the children see their fathers unable to protect them from the war and unable to feed them after losing his job due to the sanctions, they look for an alternative that could be Hamas or Fatah."
(Xinhua News Agency January 11, 2009)