Imagine you are a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza. You are lying wounded in a hospital. Air strikes periodically rock the building. Your parents are dead. Your one-year-old brother and three-year-old sister have just been zipped together into a body bag. Three siblings are still buried somewhere under your apartment building with six of their cousins and four aunts and uncles who were sheltering in the same apartment with you.

You don’t need a PhD in terrorism studies to figure out this kid’s likely life path.

Since September 11, 2001 governments around the world—including Israel—have spent tens of millions of dollars on research to identify the triggers for radicalization. Cut through all the other noise and the findings come down to this: If you have been exposed to violence you are significantly more likely to commit violence.

Nearly 4,000 Gazan children have been killed by Israeli bombs in the last month, some 40 percent of the total fatalities. According to Save the Children, that’s more than the annual toll in all the world’s conflict zones combined since 2019. At least a thousand more children are believed buried beneath the rubble. The rest have been exposed to trauma at a level that even American soldiers who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam can only imagine.

Now think about what the next decade is going to bring.

We’re not talking here about the horror of what Hamas inflicted on Israel. That was unspeakable. We are not talking about the trauma that Israelis and Jews around the world are enduring. That is tragic. We are talking about the arc of terrorism and the stark reality that a new cycle of radicalization is being seeded in Gaza, which UNESCO calls a “graveyard for children” and a “living Hell for everyone else.”

We can all write the script for this novel. It doesn’t take much imagination. A decade ago, a team led by the chair of a NATO research task force had university students role play the personae of a would-be suicide bomber. The results “were eerily similar to accounts of real (failed) suicide bombers.” They were driven by secondary trauma, motivated by “revenge and justice,” and “[m]ost imagined targeting children or civilians” in order to “inflict the worst and most horrific revenge on their enemies.”

Those students were triggered by imagining the circumstances that create a terrorist, without ever leaving the comfort of the focus group room. They were motivated by that ideology of revenge in response to perceived injustice and humiliation at the heart of terrorism.

Imagine their real-world counterparts in Gaza today.

A U.S. government study of Palestinian suicide bombers between the ages of 12 and 17 years old found that, “In almost every case, these potential bombers […] have a relative or close friend who was killed, wounded, or jailed during the Israeli occupation.” A European Union report published last summer concluded that 91 percent of Palestinian children in the territory suffered from PTSD.

That was all before the current conflict.

The 12-year-old in the emergency room is, of course, a fictional composite, but variations of his story are playing out across Gaza, where hospitals are running out of body bags and some dead children will never be identified. Let’s say that boy buries his mental trauma and compartmentalizes his anger. What other drivers of radicalization litter his path and those of countless others?

Early experiences of abandonment? Check. Perceived injustice? Check. Experiences of stigmatization? Check. Personal uncertainty? Check. Family dysfunction? Check. Family breakdown? Check. Friendships with radicalized individuals? Check.

“Individuals radicalize through progressive exposure to violent political actions,” according to terrorism experts Arie W. Kruglanski, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. It doesn’t get much more violent than Gaza today.

Other predictors of radicalization include level of education and professional integration. Parts of Gaza already resemble a post-apocalyptic film set. Hundreds of schools have been damaged or destroyed. It is hard to see any significant portion of this generation of Gazan children ever returning to the classroom –– much less having a profession in an economy that barely existed even before the war.

And finally, there is the “deficiency of life skills.” UNICEF defines those as “a group of psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills”, from stress management and positive thinking to empathy and resilience. Such skills “help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathize with others, and cope with and manage their lives in a healthy and productive manner.” This is pretty much a list of everything a kid growing up in Gaza over the next few years is unlikely to develop.

“Once a ‘besieged enclave,’ Gaza will be reduced to a ‘supercamp’ of internally displaced persons,” political scientist Nathan J. Brown predicted in a November report on the territory’s post-war prospects. “This seems less like the day after a conflict than a long twilight of disintegration and despair.”

We don’t have to look far to see the cause-and-effect.

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon claimed more than 17,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives. It resulted in the rise of Hezbollah, the militant organization that killed more Americans than any other group before 9/11 and is today more powerful than Hamas.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq left an estimated 300,000 Iraqis dead. It was responsible for the collapse of Iraqi society and the birth of the Islamic State and a variety of other terror groups.

America’s twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan cost 2.3 trillion US dollars and left an estimated 70,000 dead. It produced a revitalized and reenergized Taliban, which is already responsible for a surge in terrorism in neighboring Pakistan.

But, of course, this war will be different…

Just six weeks before Hamas launched its deadly assault in Israel, the UN’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process warned of an explosion of violence “fueled and exacerbated by a growing sense of despair about the future.”

Think of this despair now. History tells us how this latest chapter plays out.