hello, i kasia madera with bbc news was that the us president has been trying to come fears over the spread of the coronavirus, telling the american people that the risk remains very low. the first time, more new cases have been recorded outside of china, than inside the country. there has also been a sharp rise in cases in my life is that the number of killed in clashes in delhi has risen to 27. prime minister modi has risen to 27. prime minister modi has called for an and surveillance. and this video has been getting a lot of attention on our website. a massive explosion of the largest crude oil refinery on america's west coast. bikers say they contained the blaze within the compound and no—one had been evacuated, but it remains closed at two fire crews say they contained the blaze. that's all for

me. it'sjust 12:30am. contained the blaze. that's all for me. it's just 12:30am. it's contained the blaze. that's all for me. it'sjust 12:30am. it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the past few days have seen rising tension in gaza. islamist militants fired rockets into israel. the israelis responded with air strikes aimed at the islamichhad group. hardly unusual and certainly not the stuff of international headlines, but that in itself is telling. in gaza conflict is the norm, so too an economic blockade that has long choked the economy. my guest is dr yasser abu jamei, the director of gaza's biggest mental health programme. what happens to a people living with trauma and collective despair? theme music plays.

yasser abu jamei, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. it's great to have you in our london studio. your home is in gaza. you work under the most intense pressure. i want to begin with a question about your own psyche, rather than your patients‘. how does it feel to be out of gaza? well, it is lovely. anyone who is leaving for a short trip or out of this place would be really nice so what if you can't do it every day? what if it's really difficult to leave? what if you need a lot of things in order to manage to leave, so i'm really glad that i'm here, i'm really glad that i made it... i guess, partly, i'm thinking,

doesn't give you a different perspective on what life is like for the gazan people when you can look at it from outside? you feel that you are free. you start enjoying freedom. when you are just in gaza, you feel like being locked inside. like it is a big open—air prison by what it all means. so when you have the chance to leave, just for a while or for a short period of time, then you feel the freedom, actually, and this is something that is not nice at all when you live in your own place, in your own country and you don't feel free inside. you are the director of the gaza community health programme. we think of gaza, we think of what happens in the conflict. we count up the casualties every time there is any sort of military confrontation with israel. you don't deal with the physical casualties, you deal with the mental fallout. do you think actually that the mental health problems are more pervasive than the physical?

certainly, yes. the problem is that it's sometimes not obvious that someone would have some issue regarding mental health. mental health, if we look at the definition by the world health organization, we speak about about a status of wellbeing, where a person will be capable or knows his own abilities and, at the same time, be able to cope with the stress and then we speak about being able to be productive, help and support his community. so when you look at these different components of being healthy, when it comes to mental health, certainly in gaza we have issues with dealing with stresses because these are not normal conditions that we are living under. we have problems with just enjoying daily life because, instead ofjust being productive, we have also issues related to being helpful to the community. when you look at figures when it comes to, for example, poverty, when it comes to unemployment, which are really

staggering in the last few years. on top of that, we have the economic hardship et cetera et cetera. two million people live in the gaza strip — it's only 20 or so miles long — and almost half of those people are actually children. yep. i know that a lot of your work also focuses on them. yep. here are the words of the palestine director of the norwegian refugee council, katie o'rourke. she says that "gaza's humanitarian crisis has left an entire generation emotionally damaged." she says, "it takes years of work with these children to undo the impact of trauma and restore their sense of hope for the future." my question to you is, can the damage be repaired? well, certainly damages can be repaired but you need to have ways for that repair to happen. any 15 or 16—year—old child today

has already experienced or lived under three different large—scale offensives or operations. imagine, 2008, people were hearing the bombardment for 22 days, without having a safe place to run to. in 2012, for like 8 days. and in 2014 — the latest one — it was for 52 days where you continued to hear the bombardment and there is no safe place at all. international community reports say that 75% of the people who got killed during those days were simply civilians. now, we need to add to that those young people who are living in gaza, the general population who are living in gaza, like anyone who is exposed to a traumatic event, you need time for the natural healing processing or reprocessing of the trauma to take place and then you go on with your life. you need even time for therapy or where you feel safe and secure, in order to go on with your life. this status is not happening until now, unfortunately because, every now and then, as you know, you hear about some certain escalation where for a couple of nights you hear bombardments

or missiles or shelling that is taking place in the gaza strip. you're saying this is not one—off trauma, this is a sort of rolling constant, persistent repetition of trauma. exactly. it is ongoing traumatic conditions and that is why now, with the who talking about more complex trauma, generally. it is not only simple post—traumatic disorders. so concepts that we bandy about in western society, things like post—traumatic stress syndrome and indeed even depression — do they mean something different in gaza? well, certainly, i am a psychiatrist so when i work on diagnosis we use the diagnostic and statistical manual, for example, which is a us manual that is used for diagnosis. what we talk about in a gaza is that we have that, we see that but we have something that is additional to that,

which is the status of pre or post. if someone got traumatized, for example, a few months ago, then what was his condition pre that traumatising event? he was certainly or she was certainly exposed to previous traumatic injuries and then there is no post because every now and then — i mean, life does not go on in a safe condition where you enjoy being alive, it certainly doesn't do that... i just wonder whether there is a danger, in a funny sort of way, being involved in psychiatry in gaza, of over—diagnosing the problem because, in the words of samahjabr, who i think the chair of the mental health unit at the ministry of health. yep. she says, "it is not the people who are sick, it is our situation that is sick and you can't remedy a person's mental problems if they are entirely related to a situation which they cannot change." well, certainly, today we don't

speak, when it comes to psychiatry, mostly about the medical model, we speak about more of a biopsychosocial model... sorry, a what? that sounds very much jargon. bio is medicine, and psycho which is the psyche and social which is the society, which means that you need all the time to keep in mind all those three aspects of life. it's not only what happens inside your mind, or how you were born or what genes you have, but also you need to look also deeply into the environment you live in and, when it comes to disorders like ptsd or acute stress disorder, or all those anxiety—related disorders, you need to keep all the time in mind the stresses that one lives under. let me ask you a very blunt question which is related to this, because gaza is such an enclosed space where experience is collective, and you as a psychiatrist cannot divorce yourself from the reality that your patients are going through,

i'm very mindful that in 2014 your own family home was bombed, destroyed by an israeli military strike. tell me how many members of your extended family were lost? well, we live in an area that is the eastern side of khan yunis and, unfortunately, my family endured the biggest loss when it comes to a number of people. each single life matters a lot to everyone, but in that single attack, 27 people got killed, including three pregnant women and i think seven children. they — a three—storey building was levelled to the ground, basically, and it was not there anymore and... in that context, and it is obviously it is impossible really for me to imagine what impact that must‘ve had on you and yourfamily, but in that context, how, even weeks and months afterward, can you offer meaningful help to others when you must have been in the darkest place yourself?

well, it's a very challenging condition, certainly it is. and then the other thing is that you need to look for help, and help comes from different places. one of the places that offers help is your own family. one of the places that offers help — a professional way of help — is your own colleagues. and then you have colleagues who come and call and you chat with them, from the international community, those mental health professionals who offer some sort of what we call careful caregivers or supervision. you are massively under—resourced, aren't you, in terms of psychiatry and mental healthcare, inside gaza. yes. you have a pitiful number of trained psychiatrists. yes, very few number of people. the issue also is that the number of clients, of patients who arrive at your community centre — we have three community centres —

almost increased by 50% since 2014, so rather than having around 2,000 patients per year now you're having more than 3,000 patients per year. it's a huge responsibility. and all the time resources are not up to deliver the needs. do you have kids? yeah, i have five. you have five children. yep. you are going back to gaza at the end of this week. yep. is there a part of you, part of your psyche which thinks, "i don't want to go back and i'd like my children to live in the sort of freedom i am experiencing right now, far away from gaza"? well, i can tell you even more than that. i spent a year in the uk in 2011, where i did my masters, and my kids were still younger than now, of course, and they did not come with them because of schooling et cetera et cetera. i was all the time asking myself why my children are not enjoying the same spaces, the same life that other people enjoy? and this happens with me whenever or wherever i go

to, but the answer is not, of course, to take them out of gaza, the answer is how to make gaza a safe place, how to make people enjoy freedom in that place, because it's not only my children, you speak about more than 900,000 children in gaza who go through these conditions. people come to visit you in gaza, from international ngos and from governments as well. you are the successor to a very well—known psychiatrist who actually established your community mental health programme, eyad al—sarraj. he was internationally known and respected. his son describes the sense of frustration that politicians, diplomats, ngo leaders would visit his father, mr al—sarraj, would express the greatest sympathy about what was happening to the people of gaza, would pledge support and yet, in the end, nothing ever changed. do you feel that sense of frustration? well, i tell you something, when he established

the gaza community mental health programme, in 1990, his idea was to offer help to children and women who were suffer from mental health illnesses or stresses that we are living under. imagine since those 30 years, friends that you have mentioned, they kept all the time telling one very simple sentence, which is, each time we come to gaza we thought that it would never get worse but each second time we visit, we know that we were mistaken and it got worse. we are frustrated with these conditions but i can tell you that also people who visit us are also frustrated. there is a need to change the realities in gaza, there is a need to change things, you know. let's talk a little bit about politics. not in the sense of specific party politics butjust the overarching sort of sense of where the palestinian people of gaza are going, what they can hope for. the message from hamas, the islamic resistance movement which governs gaza, is all about that word,

"resistance", "struggle", "confrontation" with israel. do you think that concept, that ideology is of any use to the people of gaza any more? well, i'll tell you what the people of gaza feel, you know. for example, any father of three orfour orfive children, he already knows that his young children are not going anywhere with their education, you know. more than 70% of young people — 70%, i am saying, 7—0 — are unemployed. the poverty figures in gaza — 54% of the people are under the poverty line, which is more than 1 million people. deep poverty, more than 53%, over 100,000 people. so when you speak about those figures, what can the people do in order to change things, you know?

but the danger, if i may say so, doctor, is that the result of that sort of despair is a sort of nihilism amongst the people. and i am thinking now of hamas and its efforts to encourage people every week to go down to that militarised borderfence with israel, to get as close as they can. some of the young people are encouraged to throw rocks, to resist, as they put it. and the inevitable consequence, because the israelis have said that they will not allow what they regard as "terrorist activity" on their border, the inevitable consequence is that snipers open fire. and over the last, what, 1.5 years, hundreds of mostly young palestinians have been killed. for you, as a psychiatrist, do you wish that the leaders of hamas would stop encouraging young people to do that sort of thing?

well, i'll tell you more than one thing. first, more than 3,000 children got wounded during that 1.5 years, not only a few hundred. i think 3,300 children were wounded. second, a lot of the people, they were just going to demonstrate that they were not happy with the conditions, that we are living under crazy conditions, and no—one is really doing anything about it — knowing that no—one at all, you know? we live a life that is getting more and more deterioration in front of the eyes of the international community, and nothing is really happening. most of the people were going spontaneously. but of course, there were some efforts to send people to that. and the other shocking issue, which is what is that... how was it so far with the alternative, with the original plan, which is the peace talks, you know? and this is the thing

that is sending the most negative message with the palestinian people. where is the pa now? how are things happening with the peace talks? i mean, where is palestine now? where is the country of palestine? well, the palestinians are deeply divided. your — gaza is, as i said, ruled by hamas. the west bank is ruled by the palestinian authority, dominated by fatah. for 13 years, these two authorities have been at loggerheads, sometimes literally fighting each other. what we see in both gaza and the west bank is corruption. we see curbs on freedom of speech. we see people who are repressed by their own leaderships. this is part of the problem. it is not all a sort of psychological state created by israel. this is also created by palestinian leaders. yes, but this at the same time doesn't justify why the palestinian people now are living under blockade in the gaza strip. this doesn't justify way we have hundreds of thousands of settlers who have increased in the last 13 years in the west bank.

this doesn't justify that we are going to have a capital of — i mean, jerusalem, recognised by some countries as the capital. this doesn't justify anything like that. i understand what you're saying, but ijust wondered whether there is time and again... you're a not a politician, you're a psychiatrist. is it time for a different kind of thinking, to help palestinians express themselves and think of their future? 0ne specific example. there is a real problem, according to israel, but also to international observers, with the messages that are embedded in palestinian schoolbooks. from grades two to 12, according to one analysis by the impact—se research institute in the hebrew university, palestinian schoolchildren are exposed to incitement and intolerance against jews and israel in subjects from social studies to history to arabic.

there is violence or incitement to violence, hatred, radical, inappropriate and disturbing content aimed atjews. again, as a psychiatrist, would you send a message to your own leaders saying this is damaging, it's damaging the minds of our young people? let me tell you something. you know, yesterday i was walking in one of the famous bookstores here in london, and it is all the time enjoyable to walk, because really i consider them fancy bookstores. we don't have such things in gaza. and, just going through some of the shelves, i saw a very interesting atlas. it shows a lot of maps. and interestingly, it was maps of neighbourhoods, uk neighbourhoods, that were bombed during the world war, you know? do you think that those maps are a threat to anyone?

you see a direct parallel? iam asking. do they — i mean, do they show any threats to anyone? if we say... so when schoolbooks aimed at children as young as seven and eight contain violence, incitement to violence, anti—semitic wording and imagery, you... it certainly doesn't contain that — it certainly doesn't contain that. we need to ask people what they mean by it, if there is any sentences like what you said. to my knowledge, there is nothing like that. but again, if i say my grandparents were born there, would that be something that is not good for anyone? if i say that more than 500 villages were simply — people werejust, you know, uprooted from those villages in 1948, would that be something that's not good to say? is that inciting violence? i will give you another example.

i was reading something — sometimes i read something interesting, you know. it was about the door of ten downing street, you know, and it was an interesting story that that door had to be, you know, at a certain moment, to be repaired, because a shell fell in that door during the war. and they had to paint the whole place. it's part of history, you know? history is important, but... it doesn't mean that something is not right. history doubtless is important, but for the 2 million people of gaza, what matters most is the future. a final thought for you, and again it's about a mindset, an approach. donald trump and his so—called "deal of the century" has caused outrage amongst palestinians, and there are very clear reasons why. butjust focus on one aspect of it. he is saying that, were a deal to be done, the americans would pledge

at least $50 billion to invest in the west bank and gaza. he is talking about the most massive infrastructure programme, which would include roads and tunnels to connect gaza to the west bank, to end this state of imprisonment that you've talked about in this interview. is it not worth the palestinians at least considering a more open, flexible, creative, maybe we could call it pragmatic approach to the situation, the reality, that they face today? weren't we palestinians pragmatic when we accepted that more than 80% of the state will be the state of israel? we already did that more than 20 years ago, 25 years ago. and if you look at the map, that is the deal of the century, you will not only see one gaza strip. you will see six, almost, different gaza strips. we already know what does it mean to live a life like that. why should we consider accepting going through a different small

group of places or enclaves where palestinians should live, and that palestinians should go there? we are on a daily basis controlled. even sometimes the officials say that we're counting the calories that go into gaza strip. it happened once that somebody said something like that. why we should consider continuing to live under that? for what reason, you know? we would like to live... this is humanity. we are living in the 21st century. the international community made laws, and the international humanitarian law, that really controls many things and tells what is right, what is wrong. we are asking for nothing more than our rights. so, when you think of the future, do you think of hope or despair? if i am not hopeful, i won't be doing myjob now. i am hopeful, and i think things should change, you know. things should change for the better, not only for the palestinians, but for the international

community also. dr yasser abu jamei, thank you very much indeed for being on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much. this next area of low pressure moving into the south of the uk is likely to bring a mixture of rain, sleet, and noted parts of england and wales and it could be the most significant wintry blast we have seen of the season so far across southern areas, could see some tricky driving conditions for the thursday

morning commute, so stay tuned to the forecast. here it is, a area of low pressure. this is where is coming in with the cold air with a mixture of sleet and snow, mainly to the, south but the northern hills and for the cotswolds, a cold start across northern areas, further wintry showers here. for those concerned about this areas of rain, sleet, and snow which will continue to move its way across that is a through the morning, you could see some flashy deposits, into that chilterns, the northern home counties into east anglia, but the whole thing should clear away and should have left the south east, any snow will be short lived. further wintry showers across the north, temperatures ranging from 6—9d through the afternoon. through thursday night we continue with a few showers again across scotland, wintry over the hills,

but elsewhere winds will turn lighter briefly with clear skies, it will turn to cold and that is thanks to a ridge of high pressure, again with some frost around and some ice to watch out for. is a short lived settled spell thanks to that ridge of high pressure because the next weather system will be putting in from the south—west friday, so this will introduce outbreaks rain, after a cold bright start in the north the clouds will build, the rain will spill northwards, we could see some of the leading edge of the front across northern england to scotland, settling snow over the hills with some heavier and further south too, and it will be turning milder and windier, ten, 11 degrees there. very unwelcome rain in areas we really don't need it. the next weather front sweeps across the uk to bring more rain, could see a spell of severe gales in northern england and into scotland. into sunday this next feature could bring another round of rain as well, so pretty unsettled into the weekend, very windy at times, especially on saturday, and we are going to see more rain where we really don't need it.

so stay tuned to the forecast, head online to check out all of the latest weather and flood warnings.

welcome to newsday on the bbc. i mariko 0i in singapore. the headlines: president trump tries to calm fears over the spread of the coronavirus, telling the american people the risk remains very low. we are very, very ready for this, for anything, whether it's going to be a breakout of larger proportions or whether or not we are, you know, we are at that very low level. international efforts to contain the coronavirus outbreak intensify as more new cases are recorded outside of china than inside. and i'm kasia madera in london.