Since October 7th, 2023, Gaza has been subjected to a relentless barrage of bombs and grave human rights violations by the Israeli army. These actions have included enforced starvation, the bombing of designated safe zones, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and the deliberate destruction of hospitals and schools. Children have also been explicitly targeted. As a result of these attacks, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister, citing allegations of genocide. On 19th May 2025, the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and France also publicly condemned Israel's actions in Gaza. They warned of possible sanctions, called for an end to the offensive and aid restrictions, and began taking concrete measures—including suspending trade talks.
What we are witnessing—the systematic stripping away of rights, dignity, and the basic means of survival through apartheid, starvation, and destruction—amounts, for many, to genocide. While the violence has intensified since October 7th, the oppression of Palestinians is not new. It traces back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Nakba that followed, during which Palestinians were forcibly displaced and denied their right to return.
As an Arab clinician, these events raise urgent and overwhelming questions for me. How can I help? What should that help look like, particularly given the inevitable psychological and emotional toll on Palestinians? This is especially pressing in the context of refugee resettlement.
Rachael Maskell, MP for York Central, and others have called for a Ukraine-style visa scheme for Palestinian refugees—an initiative met with resistance in Parliament. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees are arriving with deeply complex mental health needs, including symptoms of complex PTSD, grief and bereavement, anxiety in various forms, changes in behaviour and personality, and difficulties with concentration (Kienzler et al., 2024).
But are these “mental health issues”—or are they the raw expressions of people living through relentless political violence, psychological warfare, and systemic dehumanisation? Conventional therapy such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) often seeks to help patients process their experiences and develop a sense of acceptance with the goal of reducing symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, and hypervigilance by “updating” traumatic memories. Yet when the destruction and suffering are historical and ongoing, it is difficult to comprehend what exactly Palestinian refugees are expected to update. Are we asking them to accept the horrors they’ve witnessed and endured—to reduce their fear and hypervigilance because they are now “safe” in the UK? But how safe is the UK when Islamophobia remains a real and present danger (as displayed by the rise of the Reform political party and the race riots that took place in the summer of 2024)? Should the families, mothers, and communities of the 15,613 Palestinian children killed in Gaza accept that children like Hind Rajab were unsafe there—but now, in death, are somehow considered sheltered from violence and abuse?
Individual acceptance of traumatic experience would also mean coming to terms with surviving ethnic cleansing, and reconciling with the fact that the very country offering them ‘safety’ has supported or been complicit in settler colonialism. If so, is that acceptance a path to healing—or yet another layer of violence? Could true healing instead lie in the rejection of this dehumanisation, in reclaiming the autonomy to resist imposed narratives and imposed pain? And if we, as clinicians, help facilitate that acceptance—what does that say about us? Are we complicit in dehumanising Palestinians by setting therapeutic goals that implicitly deny the full truth of their experience? Living in a world that constantly delegitimises Palestinian identity and suffering is itself a form of dehumanisation (Tamimi and Vargas, 2024). So how can we approach healing in a society where political and social discourse often fails to see the Palestinian body as fully human?
The trauma of the Palestinian experience is not only personal but deeply collective. It spans generations, shaping identities and producing inherited cycles of pain. Addressing this kind of trauma means going beyond immediate interventions—it requires systemic approaches that prioritise structural justice, the right to agency, and accountability (Kienzler et al., 2024). Healing and justice are tightly bound up in entrenched systems of power and oppression—addressing one without the other may not be enough.
Intergenerational trauma demands long-term, systemic responses. Services like Refugee Action (www.refugee-action.org.uk) and Why Me (https://why-me.org) are working to meet some of these needs. However, their work—like that of many other support systems—is constrained by the political landscape in the UK, where protest risks criminalisation and cultural safety. This does not mean that therapeutic support should be withheld; rather, it challenges the efficacy of the 'Psych' profession, which is often rooted in Western, Eurocentric frameworks that align more closely with colonial systems than with the lived realities of those affected by them (Fernando, 2017).
The needs of Palestinians in suffering extend far beyond the psychological; they are fundamentally rooted in political, racial, medical, and social justice. While therapy can help alleviate some suffering, it is not enough when the psychological suffering is not simply individual but deeply structural. If we narrow the focus to mental health alone, we risk ignoring the broader, more urgent call for systemic change—and for humanity.
For Palestinian refugees, healing is not just about surviving—it is about enduring pain with purpose. It is about reclaiming humanity, beauty, and agency in a world that has systematically denied them safety and justice. As Rafeef Ziadah has said, Palestinians “teach life.” That lesson demands more than just therapy—it demands transformation.
We, as clinicians, as communities, as institutions, must ask ourselves: What does support truly mean? Are we willing to confront the systems that create suffering—not just treat its symptoms? Are we prepared to offer more than words, more than therapy?
Healing begins not with therapy alone, but with humanity. And humanity, in this case, is long overdue.
Contact: Any questions regarding the blog piece should be directed at Prof. Hanna Kienzler, who can be reached at hanna.kienzler@kcl.ac.uk
Endorsement and support: The piece has been endorsed and supported by Prof. Hanna Kienzler, co-director of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health and the Refugee Mental Health and Place Network at King’s College London, as well as by Dr Bhavna Sennik and Dr Guntars Ermansons, who are respectively a member and co-lead of the Refugee Mental Health and Place Network.