3rd December 2025
Even in safety, the echoes of distant wars invade our minds. How global conflict is reshaping the mental landscape of people who never hear a bomb fall.
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By Musa Sattar, London, UK
It is eight o’clock in the morning of June this year in a quiet English suburb. Hanna [1], a mother of two, stands in her kitchen in Surrey, pouring cereal into small bowls. For a moment, the clinking of spoons pauses. The television hums with grim headlines from the Middle East. On the screen, images of missile trails over Haifa flicker across the room’s soft light. Hanna lowers her gaze to her phone, refreshing a messaging app where her family in Kababir, the neighbourhood on top of Mount Carmel where she grew up, shares updates.
‘I lived on top of the Carmel Mountain, in a peaceful neighbourhood called Kababir, in Haifa,’ she says softly. ‘The beauty of it was the open view of the city and the Mediterranean Sea. My house was built above my grandparent’s house, right across the mosque.’
That beauty now feels like a memory from another world. When the war between Israel and Gaza began, followed by the conflict with Iran, her daily rhythm fractured. ‘When the missiles started to rain down in Haifa, my first reaction was utter dread. I found myself in tears often.’
Although she lives thousands of miles from the explosions, Hanna is caught in an invisible crossfire, the emotional battlefield of global war coverage. ‘Every day I would ring to find out the situation in Kababir,’ she recalls. ‘Sirens were going off every day, and my family had to rush back and forth between their home and shelters. Not everyone has bunkers there, so I knew there was imminent risk of the worst.’
Her voice steadies as she adds, ‘I held firm in my faith that Allah would protect them. This was the hope that kept me going.’
She and her husband now raise their children in safety, but her mind remains tethered to the hill where sirens still wail.
Hanna is one of millions who live far from battlefields yet find themselves pulled into war’s orbit. She has never seen the craters that scar her hometown, but she feels their aftershocks daily.
Wars in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Libya, and across the Indian subcontinent are not just shaping geopolitics, they’re shaping the global psyche. These conflicts, once confined to distant frontlines, now saturate social media feeds, dominate news cycles, and seep into everyday conversations. In the 21st century, war has become ambient: not only expanding its geographic footprint, but embedding itself into the emotional fabric of societies worldwide. The battlefield is no longer just physical; it’s psychological, digital, and deeply personal.
Psychologists call this phenomenon vicarious trauma, the transmission of stress and anxiety from witnessing suffering rather than experiencing it first-hand. Dr Pam Ramsden from the University of Bradford found that shows that even those who simply follow war through news and social media may experience symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress [2].
In Gaza, a peer-reviewed clinical study published in July 2025,[3] found that 83.5% of adults met the criteria for probable PTSD, with 65% reporting moderate to severe anxiety. While these figures measure those directly exposed to war, the ripples extend outward. Professor Metin Başoğlu, an authority on trauma studies and behavioural treatment, warns that ‘fear of drones and unpredictable violence generalises even to less frequently targeted regions. Humans acquire fear vicariously through media or by hearing about others’ trauma.’[4]
In the age of smartphone technology, the geography of fear has shifted [5]. The battlefield is global, but so too is the audience and empathy, when unmoderated, can become its own kind of wound.
For Hanna, fear arrived not in a single wave but in a steady tide. ‘Following the news so regularly, seeing the gruesome images, reading heart-wrenching stories of those suffering everyday then seeing everyone around me acting all normal felt almost dystopian,’ she explains.
Her anxiety manifested physically: loss of appetite, sleepless nights, tears she hid from her children. ‘I lose the passion and energy in my life in day-to-day tasks,’ she says. ‘I find myself crying and unable to function. I had to take breaks. I had to save myself.’ She began hiding her tears from her children. ‘I didn’t want them to see their mother broken.’
Hanna’s words illustrate what researchers describe as secondary traumatic stress [6], a condition where indirect [7] exposure to trauma even for altruistic reasons, triggers similar responses to those of direct victims. Studies show that individuals who consume war-related content for more than two hours a day report elevated stress hormones and impaired sleep patterns.
When I spoke to Dr Yael Danieli, the pioneering clinical psychologist in New York whose work on the multigenerational effects of trauma spans decades, she told me that unprocessed pain rarely stops with one generation. ‘Trauma doesn’t fade with time. If it remains unaddressed, it persists,’ she said during our conversation. ‘The way survivors adapt, how they cope and raise children becomes the vehicle of transmission.’ [8]
Hanna recognises this dynamic. ‘Initially, I didn’t show my children anything,’ she says….
Read More Here: https://www.reviewofreligions.org/47517/the-war-that-reaches-beyond-borders/
