Gaza: In a heart-wrenching incident, toddlers inside a displacement camp in Gaza were seen carrying a doll on a makeshift stretcher, a game that was, in fact, a funeral.
The video, published by a Palestinian content creator, shows a group of children carefully lifting their doll on a stretcher to re-enact a funeral procession during play. The now-viral footage, a stark window into daily life in the besieged territory, showed young children mimicking rituals they have grown up watching – lifting the dead overhead before the final prayers.
Except here, the dead was a doll and the pallbearers had not yet learned to walk steadily.
Trauma play
Psychologists who study children in conflict zones say what these toddlers were doing is trauma play and it is neither random nor cause for dismissal. According to Seth Aronson, a psychologist at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry in New York, one of the functions that play serves for children is that it allows them to approach something frightening in a way that makes it less so.
Through play, children control the tempo, the pace and the content of a situation. “If it’s happening to a doll,” Aronson explains, “it’s not really happening to me.”
But there is a limit to how far play can carry a child. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita at Lesley University and an expert on how young children process trauma, notes that when the same troubling event is re-enacted over and over with the same outcome, without resolution, it may be a sign that psychological intervention is needed.
For children in Gaza, however, there is no resolution in sight.
Over 72,000 killed in Gaza
Since the Israeli military offensive intensified following October 2023, the death toll in Gaza has climbed to nearly 72,300, with over 1,72,014 others wounded. By June 2025, at least 17,000 children in Gaza were estimated to be unaccompanied or separated from their families, according to UNICEF.
The video drew an outpouring of grief online. “Heartbreaking. How we failed them,” wrote one user. “Babies, instead of playing house, they play at carrying martyrs to their graves,” read another comment.
A third wrote, “Who can imagine that a child’s idea of play is a funeral — that they have grown so accustomed to death at an age when they should know nothing of it.”
