When clinical psychologist Scarlett Wong began receiving children in Gaza for treatment, her team was told the kids needed help for developmental delay or autism. But their condition had nothing to do with either. They were starving. "When you see a starving child, they are apathetic - they have no response," Wong told SBS News. "That is the kind of thing we were seeing from a medical view ... children have become frozen, with no emotion and apathetic.
"Children haven't been to school for seven months and if you think about what that was like during COVID for us, and we had safety, how hard that was. "They didn't have school and they had ... bombs raining down on them. The children were listening to quad-copters, and we knew what that meant." But as her placement was wrapping up in Gaza, it was the final messages from her colleagues to the world that still haunt her.