Palestine
Meet Our Member:
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP)
Amid stark divisions in the West over Israel’s war on Gaza, IRCT’s ability to draw on the expertise of its members proved invaluable to collective efforts to speak out against the torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, and the impacts of war on individuals and families in Gaza.
Since its foundation in Gaza in 1990, the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) has supported tens of thousands of Palestinians suffering from complex and serious traumas.
GCMHP has been a member of the IRCT for over two decades. In 2023, GCMHP treated 4,500 patients, a third of them children. In October, 2023 Israel launched a war against Hamas in retaliation for the appalling Hamas-led attacks that killed over 1,200 people in Israel, mainly civilians, included widespread reports of torture, and in which 251 hostages were taken from Israel into Gaza.
Over the course of Israel’s war on Gaza in 2024, staff at GCMHP reported supporting more than 30,000 of their fellow Palestinians, principally through psychological first aid to displaced families, focusing on women, children, the elderly and those with disabilities.
This was achieved despite Israeli bombardment destroying two of GCMHP’s three offices (the third was left damaged and unusable) and having several staff members and their families killed or seriously injured, and all staff being forced to leave their homes to live in tents and school corridors.
What GCMHP’s staff found when they were able to return to outreach work was a sea of need: Mothers unable to breathe as they remembered images of their children’s bodies torn to pieces; fathers expressing hopelessness and despair as homes and livelihoods built up over a lifetime of struggle were reduced to rubble in seconds; children too anxious to leave their parent’s side, wetting the bed and waking screaming from nightmares.
Since its foundation in 1990, GCMHP has grown to become the leading provider of mental health care for children suffering complex traumas in Gaza.
Insights:
Supporting Community Mental Health Amid War and Torture
Meet Our Member:
Treatment & Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture (TRC)
In Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, IRCT member, the Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre (TRC) has supported nearly 30,000 survivors of torture and ill-treatment since its foundation in 1997. Some 90 percent of its cases are Palestinians released from Israeli detention.
During 2024, TRC reported a large increase in requests for support, which it attributed to the increase of operations by Israeli security forces in the West Bank, and thousands of arrests. “Demand is so high,” said Khader Rasras, General Director, TRC. “We are trying to reach them where they are, but often the roads are closed by the Israelis. For now, we are providing mental health and psychosocial support to families, because people are so emotionally wounded.”
Through field visits and a telephone hotline, TRC was able to support over 5,000 seriously traumatised Palestinians since 7 October 2023, nearly triple their usual annual number. Staff at TRC also conducted in-person interviews with 100 Palestinians released from Israeli detention since October 7 2023. The subjects were selected at random from a list of detainees compiled by the Palestinian Authority. According to these interviews:
- 89 reported being punched, kicked, or slapped by Israeli officials
- 64 reported being hit with batons
- 26 reported broken bones
- 63 were assessed by TRC psychologists as meeting the diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
TRC’s questionnaire used to document the torture and other ill-treatment of 100 Palestinians released from Israeli detention since 7 October 2023, and its psychosocial impacts.
Meet Our Member: TRC Palestine
While the huge majority of survivors treated by TRC are Palestinians released from Israeli detention, the organisation also provides rehabilitation to survivors of torture by Palestinian security forces.
Both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have well documented histories of using arbitrary detention and torture against their perceived opponents. During its first review of Palestine in July 2022, the Committee Against Torture noted, “consistent reports indicating that persons in custody, including in the facilities under the authority of security forces and intelligence services in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are subjected to torture or ill-treatment, in particular during the investigation stage of proceedings.”
“We encourage the children to draw … Sometimes you just ask the children to use toys to tell stories … and they say, the airplane came here, it bombed us. We were under the rubble and then left. And the therapist tries to get rid of the fears, help him feel that it’s gone, safe, that if his house was destroyed, for example, it will be rebuilt.”
In Focus:
Gaza After the Ceasefire
Following the ceasefire agreed between Hamas and Israel in October 2025, IRCT supported GCMHP to advocate for an international response to the widespread and serious mental health needs of Palestinians in Gaza, which it had documented in a report released in the same month. The IRCT Council also published a statement that month, ‘Rebuilding Gaza Begins with Healing Minds’.
Under a crisis response grant in 2025 from the United Against Torture Consortium (UATC), GCMHP supported 737 survivors with Psychological First Aid (PFA) and also made assessments of their mental health. Fully 41% showed severe psychological symptoms, with nearly all the remainder showing mild to moderate, while 63% also showed physical symptoms related to their experiences. Just under half were referred on to GCMHP’s community mental health centres for advanced services. Psychoeducation for Families and Communities were conducted for a further 456 family members covering psychological trauma, PTSD, coping strategies, referral pathways, and awareness of GCMHP’s services and hotline.
“Now the whole population … their cups are full of these traumas,” said Dr Yasser Abu Jamei, Director General of GCMHP.
In Depth:
Torture Journal’s Special Section on Palestine
In October 2025, the world’s leading academic source on torture prevention and rehabilitation, Torture Journal, published a double issue on the world’s most acute human rights crisis of the moment: torture in Israel and occupied Palestine.
As with previous special sections, the Journal issued a public Call for Papers, seeking contributions “to a more comprehensive and evidence-based understanding of torture, ill-treatment, and associated human rights violations in the current context, including legal, psychosocial and community impacts and peace-building through justice.”
The Call recognised that, “to conduct an analysis in the context of an ongoing war and enormous suffering is undoubtedly complex. But epidemiology and health sciences have insights to contribute which go beyond calls for a cessation of violence and thus there is an ethical duty to try to do so.”
The issue was coordinated by a multinational team of eight Guest Editors: Jens Modvig (Denmark), Tania Herbert (Australia), Mahmud Sewail (Palestine), Malcolm Evans (United Kingdom), John Schiemann (United States), Daniel Weishut (Israel), and Nora Sveaass (Norway). The composition was deliberate to include both reputed Israeli and Palestinian scholars among the coordinating editors.
On the Israeli side, the editorial team undertook targeted outreach in Israel, proactively contacting human-rights organisations and inviting submissions from medical professionals working with affected communities, including victims of the October 2023 attacks, and their families. On the Palestinian side, editors also contacted Gaza and West Bank-based organisations, making available to those wishing to submit articles, style editing and translation support from Hebrew and Arabic, and flexible deadlines.
After ten months of complex editorial work, including a rigorous cross-checking of data sets and the withdrawal of a number of authors citing security concerns, the Special Section published 15 articles, including submissions from IRCT members in Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon, international and Israeli legal scholars, and international and Palestinian medical professionals. The issue also included an editorial on the research into the ‘psychosocial mechanisms that make genocidal acts possible’, and a briefing on the UN Special Rapporteur’s report on hostage-taking as torture.
read the special section on Israel and occupied palestine in Torture Journal
“The aim of torture is not to kill the body, it’s to kill the spirit, to kill the soul. To spread fear in the person, in the family, and in the whole community. To change the character and behaviour. It is the aim of torture.”
Survivors Speak Out:
“I felt like I wasn’t human”
Manar Shweiki was 14 years old when she was arrested and beaten by Israeli police after an altercation with Jewish settlers as she walked home from school in Jerusalem.
Manar denied charges of possessing a knife and plotting a stabbing attack, and was interrogated without a lawyer or her parents. She was convicted after she says an Israeli police woman, posing as a social worker, visited her cell and tricked her into agreeing with anti-Israeli statements, while secretly filming her. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but was eventually released after four years, and received rehabilitation treatment at TRC Palestine.
Fatima – not her real name – was arrested by Israeli forces in 2018 in a raid on her university dormitory. “In my first court appearance I was asked to do a strip search, but I refused,” says Fatima, who was held at the Ofer detention centre, which is both a prison and a military court. “Then a male and female officer and prison warden came in and severely beat me. The goal is humiliation.”
“When I was released two years after I was arrested, I was confused. There was a chasm between me and reality. I had lost my abilities and was in constant fear of being arrested again,” says Fatima.
Suha Jabara, who is a Palestinian, US and Panamanian citizen, was arrested by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank on suspicion of spying, and taken to its detention centre in Ariha. “I felt like I wasn’t human from the way they treated me,” says Suha “I watched the young men being arrested and tortured, so I knew that what they will do to me.”
“When I started at TRC I was not in a good mental state. My religious faith had been shaken … You no longer trust anyone and everything is broken. TRC helped me to get up again, and to feel safe. I was able to get married and to go on with my life and with my children, helping them with their education.”
“The vast majority of Palestinian detainees are exposed to torture and ill-treatment, so psychosocial, medical and psychiatric support is very important.”
Livelihoods:
The Work of Healing
Supporting survivors of torture and other ill-treatment to return to work has become integral to TRC’s process of rehabilitation. With a grant from IRCT, TRC was able to expand its livelihoods support and conducted research into the impact on rehabilitation.
Results from TRC’s surveys with the women showed huge improvements in outcomes for survivors receiving additional livelihoods support. Levels of self esteem and family integration were twice as high among the women who received Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) with vocational training included, as compared to those who received only MHPSS.
“One quarter of the Palestinian people have been imprisoned at least once in Israeli prisons and the vast majority of detainees are exposed to torture or to other ill-treatment,” said Khader Rasras, General Director, TRC Palestine.
“This is a very large number of people who passed through this traumatic experience. So it’s very important to provide psychosocial support, medical support and psychiatric support to them so that they will be able to resume a normal life and be integrated into their own society.”
Livelihoods project in Ramallah / Credit: IRCT
“I work with female detainees and with their children. I never thought that I could become a psychologist. But now when I help people, I am happier. When I see people happy, I am happy too.”
