On June 15th, Palestinian engineer Musab Ali was martyred by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza.

I had the privilege of interviewing Musab before his death. What he shared with me was not just a project—it was a life’s mission. He had built virtual reality headsets for children in Gaza suffering from PTSD, many of whom had lost limbs, homes, and family members under constant Israeli bombardment. Musab's work was revolutionary—not just because of the technology, but because of what it dared to preserve: joy, dignity, imagination, and the mental freedom of Palestinian children.

This documentary is a testament to Musab’s legacy. It is a record of his vision, his genius, and his refusal to let trauma be the only future left for Gaza’s youth. It is also an indictment—a reminder that the world watched as Israel murdered the very people who were trying to heal what it broke.

Musab was not just a builder of tools. He was a builder of futures. And this work continues in his name.

Across Gaza—where hospitals lie in rubble, and classrooms have become morgues—something extraordinary is being built. Not weapons. Not memorials. But technology rooted in liberation: virtual reality headsets, engineered to help Palestinian children recover from trauma inflicted by Israel’s ongoing genocide. These aren’t luxury gadgets. They are survival machines, assembled from scarce materials under siege. They’re being used not to escape reality—but to resist it. In a world where Zionist aggression tries to strip Palestinians of memory, joy, and even biology, these devices become a form of abolitionist architecture—digital sanctuaries constructed for a generation that has known nothing but occupation, airstrikes, and grief.

The Genocidal System That Made This Necessary

This project was not born out of curiosity—it was born out of carnage.

Since 1948, Israel’s settler-colonial state has relied on forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid law to fracture the Palestinian people. In Gaza, this strategy is especially brutal: over two million people locked inside a narrow strip, denied food, electricity, medicine, and movement. The UN has declared Gaza unlivable. Israel has made it unlivable by design.

The psychological damage inflicted on Gaza’s population—especially its children—is not collateral. It is targeted. Israel bombs schools, kills families, and leaves survivors to pick through the rubble of their sanity. Children are born into the trauma of losing limbs before they learn to ride bikes. They learn to identify drone sounds before they learn multiplication. By age 10, they’ve attended more funerals than birthday parties.

This is not war. It is state-sponsored torture. And its aftershocks are both mental and generational.

PTSD as a Weapon of Occupation

In Gaza, trauma is not an individual wound—it is a systemic condition. Studies from Palestinian mental health organizations show that over 90% of children exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. These include chronic anxiety, nightmares, mutism, extreme aggression, bed-wetting, and dissociation.

And the trauma doesn’t end with one generation.

Epigenetic research confirms that prolonged exposure to high-stress environments—like siege, occupation, and bombardment—can alter genetic expression in ways that are inherited. This means that the grandchildren of Gaza’s survivors may carry biological imprints of trauma they never directly experienced. The damage is not just emotional—it’s cellular. Genocide lives in the blood, the breath, the brainwaves.

When Israel levels Gaza’s infrastructure, it aims to annihilate not just homes, but hope. Not just hospitals, but the neural architecture of memory itself.

Building a Future Where One Has Been Buried

The creation of VR headsets by Palestinian engineers is not a feel-good tech story. It’s a radical act of refusal. Refusal to let trauma win. Refusal to let Zionist destruction dictate who gets to heal. Refusal to give up on the idea of Palestinian joy.

These devices are programmed not just with visual landscapes—but with resistance. They transport children into scenes of peace: beaches without snipers, skies without drones, spaces where the child-self is allowed to rest. It is not an escape. It is a reclamation.

While imperial powers fund missiles, Gaza funds imagination.

These engineers, working in the ruins of targeted infrastructure, are doing what occupying forces fear most: they are preserving Palestinian humanity. Not in spite of oppression, but in direct resistance to it.

This Is What Abolition Looks Like

Healing under occupation is abolitionist work.

Israel's genocidal logic depends on a broken, destabilized, and dehumanized Palestinian people. Trauma is a tool of control. Mental health is a target. But in Gaza, even with no access to full clinical systems, Palestinians continue to build their own lifelines. They treat the psychological wounds that Israeli bombs were meant to deepen forever.

Abolition here means more than ending the violence—it means building systems that care for the living. These headsets are abolitionist tech. They reject carceral medicine, refuse victim narratives, and defy a world that says trauma must be permanent.

What To Understand

This isn’t a story about innovation. It’s a story about what Palestinians must create to survive the machinery of Western-backed settler colonialism.

This is not a conflict. It is a military occupation. A resource extraction economy. An ethnic cleansing campaign funded by Western states, normalized by corporate media, and enforced through mass surveillance and generational trauma.

Palestinians are not rebuilding after a natural disaster. They are healing under genocide, in real time, while the bombs keep falling.

And still—they create.

How To Help

• Demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel.

• Support Palestinian-led mental health and tech projects.

• Archive these stories. Share them widely. Don’t let Zionist propaganda erase this brilliance.

• Call for the abolition of the Israeli apartheid regime—not reform, not ceasefire, but total dismantling.

There is no neutrality in genocide. And there is no greater clarity than what’s being built in Gaza: a future where Palestinian children can imagine, heal, and be free—not in spite of imperial violence, but in absolute defiance of it.

Their resistance is coded, rendered, wired into the headsets they wear. In those digital worlds, you don’t just see peace—you feel it.

And from Gaza, they are daring the world to feel it too.