Gaza: rethinking and decolonizing mental health responses in humanitarian emergencies

Longstanding armed conflicts generate distinctive psychological wounds, transforming collective bonds and reconfiguring individuals’ perceptions of identity, security, and trust, enduring. The occupied Palestinian territories exemplify this violence, as prolonged occupation has produced deep, systematic, and foreseeable psychological consequences. Standard humanitarian mental health models—largely rooted in Western diagnostic paradigms—often risk individualizing and depoliticizing suffering structurally and collectively produced. Drawing on liberation psychology, decolonial mental health, and human rights approaches, this article reframes Palestinian distress as a rational response to systemic violence, displacement, and precarity. It synthesizes existing research on the psychological consequences of recurrent large-scale violence while emphasizing culturally rooted protective factors such as family cohesion, community solidarity, and sumud. The paper critically examines humanitarian MHPSS systems which, despite their importance, may inadvertently reproduce epistemic and operational hierarchies and marginalize local knowledge. A central contribution is the articulation of practical strategies for decolonizing MHPSS, grounded in field-based collaboration. These include locally led program design, reciprocal training and supervision models, culturally anchored approaches, ethical positionality, and sustained support for Palestinian practitioners navigating dual roles as caregivers and affected civilians. It concludes with directions for sustainable, justice-oriented mental health systems, arguing that meaningful healing requires structural change rooted in solidarity—not solely clinical intervention.