Any moment now, international journalists will enter Gaza, and their photographs – raw, wrenching, undeniable – will burn into the collective human psyche.

The Jewish psyche, already shattered since October 7, must brace for another rupture. What comes next will remake our legacy as a people. As a psychotherapist steeped in intergenerational trauma, I believe this to be a moment of historical importance, one that invites us to preserve our humanity.

Palestinians return this week to the ruins of the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.Credit: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images

For Jews, the trauma of October 7 will endure: Hamas’ live-streamed carnage and bloodlust, innocents slaughtered, hostages who felt like our own kin. Friends and strangers here who cheered, condoned or said nothing.

But if we are to protect our children from inheriting more pain, we must make space for another momentous task – a reckoning over the incalculable suffering inscribed in Gaza’s ruins.

The scale of destruction in Gaza will transcend politics. It will bypass ideology and strike the body directly, as a moral wound. Horror, anguish and confusion will flood in. For many, it has already proven too unbearable. Denial and blame, those oldest of defence mechanisms, have been employed as self-protection.

Intergenerational trauma is the transmission of unresolved pain across........

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