UK-Palestine Mental Health Network Mental Health Study Tour
Monday 26 October to Wednesday 4 November
This autumn we are offering a 10-day study tour for practitioners from the fields of mental health and social work who are keen to explore the complex interface between politics and psychological well-being in the particular circumstances of Palestine/Israel. The tour provides excellent access to clinicians, academics, community groups and political analysts with 25 encounters, plus additional cultural opportunities. It will be facilitated by a small UK company established in 1999 that has provided alternative tours to the area. Hotels will be in Bethlehem and Nazareth with additional visits to Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah and Jaffa/Tel Aviv […]
Full details here:https://ukpalmhn.com/resources/autumn-tour-2026/
For an application form please write including your name, address, contact information, and professional qualifications to: ukpalmhn@ukpalmhnadmin

UK-Palestine Mental Health Network (UKPALMHN) Study Tour Bursary
The UK Palestine Mental Health Network has been organising study tours to Palestine for mental health and social workers since 2016. During this time a diverse range of mental health practitioners and social workers have been on the tours. All the participants have told us they found the tours personally life changing and the experience of listening to Palestinian colleagues talk about their work both humbling and a unique learning experience. Colleagues also told us that encountering different issues whilst visiting different locations over the course of the busy 10 day tour, has been supporting them to be far more confident in their advocacy for Palestine.
Our next study tour is taking place from October 26th to November 4th 2026; we would like to offer the opportunity to trainee mental health practitioners to join the study tour, by asking colleagues who support the UK Palestine Mental Health Network to donate to the bursary scheme we are setting up. The cost of the tour is £1350, which includes accommodation, tour leader and local guides.
https://ukpalmhn.com/resources/autumn-tour-2026/
By donating to the bursary you will be joining us in supporting the next generation of mental health practitioners to meet and to learn from our colleagues in Palestine; an experience they will carry forward in their work.
Please make donations to: Experience Travel Tours Acc 68187942 Sort code 09-01-26. Reference UKPALMHN ST For enquries, please write to ukpalmhn@ukpalmhnadmin

How modern psychology is turning a genocidal army into a “morally injured” one
Source: Mondoweiss
Date: 6 May
The article argues that modern psychiatry has moved from trauma and PTSD frameworks towards “moral injury”, a concept used to describe the distress that arises when people’s actions violate their deepest moral beliefs. In Israel, the term has rapidly caught on among clinicians, journalists and scholars as a way of understanding soldiers’ guilt, shame and psychological collapse after participating in or witnessing mass killing, civilian targeting and systematic destruction. The author argues that this approach risks reframing perpetrators as patients, recentring Israeli soldiers’ suffering and pushing Palestinian suffering further out of view, while translating crimes into injury and replacing accountability with treatment.https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/how-modern-psychology-is-turning-a-genocidal-army-into-a-morally-injured-one/

The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians
Source: New York Times opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof (two‑time Pulitzer Prize winner)
Date: 11 May
The article reports interviews with 14 Palestinian men and women alleging sexual violence and torture in Israeli custody, including rape with objects, beatings targeting genitals, threats of rape, humiliation, and allegations that detainees were sexually assaulted using dogs. The report argues that Israeli authorities have created a system in which sexual violence has become, citing a UN report, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures”. Israeli officials have threatened libel action but the New York Times has prominently defended the reporting as carefully fact-checked and based on victim accounts, witnesses, lawyers, human-rights groups and independent documentation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opinion/israel-palestinians-sexual-violence.html
The New York Times article is behind a paywall but this article provides further information:
New York Times [opinion piece] confirms Israel using dogs to rape
Source: Battle Lines with Owen Jones
Date: 12 May
https://www.owenjones.news/p/new-york-times-confirms-israel-using

It’s Bisan from Gaza, this is life after “ceasefire”
Source: AJ+
Date: 7 May
Bisan reports from Gaza six months after the ceasefire, saying that although “a lot has changed”, the reality is still the same: bombings, shootings, displacement, destroyed lives and around 60% of the Gaza Strip under occupation. She speaks with children and adults who say plainly that the war is not over, describing schools turned into shelters, the lack of water, food and medical treatment, and the sound of gunfire and shelling as part of daily life. The report challenges claims that the war has ended, with Gaza residents saying that those who believe are this are not living in Gaza and do not see the continuing bombardment, deprivation and suffering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=853pDQ21DGs

Testimonies of Gaza detainees: The most prominent evidence of the ongoing extermination of prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons
Source: Palestinian Authority Commission of Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club NGO
Date: 11 May
A short report summarises recent visits by lawyers to Gaza detainees held in Naqab prison and Ramla prison clinic. It set out testimonies alleging torture, starvation, denial of treatment and humiliating treatment. The report states that 1,283 Gaza detainees are held under the “unlawful combatant” classification without charge, shielding their detention from international oversight. The two organisations call for urgent intervention to stop the systematic crimes against prisoners and detainees, and to reveal the fate of Gaza detainees, many of whom the occupation continues to forcibly disappear.https://www.ppsmo.ps/home/studies/18277?culture=ar-SA

“The settlers are in control”: How the West Bank is being ethnically cleansed
Source: Middle East Eye
Date: 15 May
Peter Oborne reports from the occupied West Bank, describing how armed settlers, backed by Israel’s far-right government and supported by the army, are using violence, land seizure, road expansion and illegal outposts to drive Palestinians from their communities. The article presents this as an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, linking daily settler attacks to wider Israeli policy under Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, while also highlighting Palestinian sumud in villages such as Burqa.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/settlers-are-control-how-west-bank-being-ethnically-cleansed

Atta loses his last plot of land – 3 May 2026
Source: ICAHD (formerly Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Date: 6 May
The video description provides a detailed background to the case. Atta Jaber, a Palestinian farmer from the Baq’a Valley near Hebron, has spent decades trying to remain steadfast on family land that has been repeatedly expropriated, attacked by settlers, and reduced to one small strip beside Highway 60, where JCB bulldozers arrived on 3 May to clear land for road widening. The case is important because the threatened destruction of Atta’s remaining farmland, alongside land belonging to other Palestinian farmers along a 12-kilometre stretch of the valley, is presented as part of a wider process of settlement expansion, forced displacement and the destruction of Palestinian agricultural life under occupation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9nrSvSaI4E

Israeli settlers block Palestinian children from playing football
Source: Middle East Eye
Date: 10 May
A video circulating on Palestinian outlets and social media shows Israeli settlers blocking Palestinian children from using a football pitch in Umm al-Khair, in the Masafer Yatta area of the occupied West Bank; the incident has also been reported by Times of Israel, which said settlers sat and stood on the pitch while children in football shirts watched.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYKMiPWDUgD/

Israeli settlers force Palestinian family to exhume and rebury their father
Source: U.S. National Public Radio (NPR)
Date: 10 May
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank dug up the grave of Hussein Asasa shortly after his burial near Jenin and forced his family to remove his body from the village cemetery, according to his relatives. His son Mohammed Asasa told NPR that the family had coordinated the burial with the Israeli military, but that settlers threatened to use a bulldozer to remove the body, while Israeli soldiers were present and did not force the settlers to leave. The story was first reported by Reuters on 9 May and a subsequent report from NPR includes its own interview with the family.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/10/nx-s1-5817496/israeli-settlers-palestinian-exhume-grave-west-bank-jenin

Gaza’s Phoenix library rises
Source: The Key
Date: 7 May
You need to create a free account to access the full article. Gaza City, Palestine – After the destruction of the missiles, after the destruction of building after building, people had no choice but to sift through the rubble for the remains of their lives – for what they would need to survive. For Omar Hamad, what he needed to survive was books. While others searched through the ruins of their homes, he sought out the ruins of libraries destroyed by Israel’s bombs. With little more than a donkey cart, he searched. His mission: to prove that the written word could endure; that it would survive this genocide. This search would grow over time into the Phoenix Library of Gaza, which has just opened its doors to the public.
https://www.thekeymagazine.com/p/phoenix-library-gaza-omar-hamad-genocide-israel
Phoenix library
https://x.com/phoenixlibrary1

The letter Starmer should write to Netanyahu, ending Britain’s blind support for Israel
Source: Gwyn Daniel writing in Middle East Eye
Date: 11 May
This ironic fictional letter imagines Keir Starmer bemoaning the fact that Britain’s attempts to protect Jewish communities have been undermined by his Government’s adopting a definition that conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel, by suppressing pro-Palestine protest, and by offering only muted criticism of Israel’s violence in Gaza and the West Bank. The author argues that antisemitic attacks remain the responsibility of those who commit them, but that Britain’s refusal to impose meaningful consequences on Israel helps sustain a climate of anger and fear in which outrage at Israeli state violence is sometimes wrongly and dangerously displaced onto Jewish communities.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/uk-starmer-serious-stamping-out-antisemitism-must-end-blind-support-israel

Palestinians forced to demolish own homes to make way for Israeli theme park
Source: The Guardian
Date: 16 May
It sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi novel … but it’s real.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/16/palestinians-demolish-family-homes-jerusalem-kings-garden-theme-park

FEATURED ACTION

Open letter to Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
Unlawful detention of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya
Source: Health Workers 4 Palestine (HW4P) and 9 other organisations
(signatories of the original letter)
Date: May 2026
This petition is open for everyone to sign
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza, has been detained by the Israeli military without charge since 27 December 2024 after refusing to leave his patients during the siege of the hospital. Released detainees describe witnessing prolonged torture, starvation, severe weakness, repeated beatings and an imminent risk of death. The letter calls on the RCPCH to issue a public statement demanding his immediate release and that of all detained healthcare workers, press the Israeli Medical Association, Israeli Paediatric Association, other national paediatric bodies and the World Medical Association to intervene, and urgently raise the case with the FCDO, the Foreign Secretary and the Middle East minister.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyP4fDnfu0AX3z07KcLHv7tm4QTcRkeSr9H2hXOGtIHrGMIg/viewform

Urgent appeal for the release of Doctor Abu Safiya
Source: European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine
Date: 15 May
The appeal is now closed but it contains further background information.
44 European organisations and around 150 medical doctors, academics and healthcare professionals issued an urgent call to the EU officials and European leaders for an immediate release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the former director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Northern Gaza, who is facing death as a result of extremely brutal torture.
https://www.eccpalestine.org/urgent-appeal-for-the-release-of-doctor-abu-safiya/

These are two separate, recent investigative reports from different sources:

New testimonies reveal Dr Abu Safiya stripped, beaten, and set upon by dogs in Israeli detention
Source: Dropsite News on X
Date: 6 May
Three recently released Palestinian prisoners have provided harrowing testimony about the condition of Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya.
https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2051905416544588287

Four Gaza doctors (including Dr Abu Safiya) face starvation, dire conditions in Israeli jails, rights group says
Source: Anadolu Agency
Date: 12 May
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/4-gaza-doctors-face-starvation-dire-conditions-in-israeli-jails-rights-group-says/3935273

FEATURED EVENTS

Meeting the Palestine Trauma Centre (UK) team in Gaza
Saturday 23 May at 11am
PTC(Gaza) was set up in 2007 in Gaza City to help train therapists in mental health skills. It was also a referral centre for those with mental disorders and PTSD symptoms. The support group, PTC(UK) was set up in 2010. PTC UK provides support and training on the ground in Gaza both in-person and via technology, ensuring that help is never too far away.
https://www.palestinetraumacentre.uk/what-we-do
Palestine Trauma Centre UK (PTC UK) will host a public zoom meeting with their team in Gaza. It is a great opportunity to hear directly from Gaza. Do join us and please share with your contacts.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83366557984

Webinar with Gérard Haddad
Source: The Francophone Palestine Mental Health Network
Date: Saturday 30 May at 1pm (UK time)
Captions will be available in a number of languages, including English.
The webinar is a conversation between Gérard Haddad, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and writer, and Georges Federmann, a psychiatrist from Strasbourg and an active member of the Francophone network. “As mental health professionals, we are particularly sensitive to the function of language in its connection to truth, whether individual, social, or collective. Our political stance as citizens resonates, sometimes unconsciously, in the transference, and patients traumatised by violence are especially vulnerable to this.  Untangling the threads of geopolitical, historical, religious, and ideological dimensions is an essential task, for which the work of G. Haddad offers invaluable support.”
https://forms.gle/dHqVvj6B4rNQPHr39

Who is Philemon? Who is Ka?
Date: Sunday 7 June at 5pm (UK time) (online)
Source: Stand By The Mother lecture series
(conceived and produced by Palestinian Jungian Analyst Heba Zaphiriou-Zarifi)
Speaker: George Bright
This fundraising lecture in support of Palestinian mothers will feature analytical psychologist George Bright discussing Jung’s figures of Philemon and Ka, and their significance for understanding Jung’s psychology, worldview and later thinking on synchronicity. There is no registration fee, but voluntary donations are encouraged for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, supporting mental health interventions for women and children, emotional healing, community rebuilding, and people in temporary shelters and vulnerable environments.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyq49_svu4x2dDcnCdS5qzGoVc8sOWRwDmzo9OxHhmydlPjA/viewform

BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT AND SANCTIONS (BDS)
A founding aim of the UK-Palestine Mental Health Network is to “encourage our colleagues individually and collectively to consider their response to the Palestinian call for boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS).”

Britain quietly approves $11.85m arms licence to Israel despite Gaza ban
Source: Middle East Monitor
Date: 8 May
The UK Department for Business and Trade has granted two new licences for military exports to Israel, including an £8.7m licence for “components and technology for targeting equipment”, despite the government’s September 2024 suspension of exports judged at risk of use in Gaza. The article argues that the licence exposes the glaring weakness of re-export exemptions, because the UK is relying on end-user declarations it does not verify or enforce, leaving open the risk that equipment supposedly destined elsewhere could be diverted for Israeli military use.https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260508-britain-quietly-approves-11-85m-arms-licence-to-israel-despite-gaza-ban/