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Palestinian children have been described as targets of the Israel government’s melange of mechanisms used to control the Palestinian people and territories. In this role, Palestinian children are subjected to direct violence, bureaucratic constructs, interrogation, incarceration, and other various means of marginalisation and oppression. Simultaneously, Palestinian children have also been depicted as nationalised subjects and resources for the future of Palestine, upon which historical and ongoing national symbols are projected. Palestinian children, therefore, play a dual role within the conflict and in everyday life: both innocent and in need of protection while also embodying sites of resistance. Nowhere is this dual role more pronounced than within the Palestinian home. In order to explore the multiple roles that children represent within the physical structure of the home, this chapter draws upon the authors’ research experience using collaborative family interviews and testimony collections in home environments. The authors’ methodological engagement with children and families at the home-level has found children to be a present absence within the home, with adult family members dominating the data-gathering discourse. In other words, children are ubiquitous within Palestinian landscapes, but they are rarely heard from. However, in research, children’s voices may be acknowledged for brief moments when data-gathering methods such as drawing or neighbourhood walks are used. Children may also be cherished as a focus of family protection and future resistance against the occupation. While much research has considered children affected by political violence as both victims and actors, this chapter adds another layer by exploring the multiple roles and representations of children within the Palestinian home. The authors focus is not on how these representations are imposed upon children by adults, but rather how representations of children are enacted and negotiated within oftentimes protective home spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to describe non-specialised, group-based interventions in displaced populations from reviewed literature, and to explore their outcomes.

A literature review was conducted using the PubMed database, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library of Systematic Reviews, and defined “grey literature”. Characteristics of the interventions were summarised into a table under key categories such as targeted persons, study setting, level of evidence, outcome measures, assessment tools used and summary of results.

In total, 11 articles were identified stemming from nine separate interventions. Three of these were considered level 1 evidence as they were randomised controlled trials. The described interventions were markedly heterogeneous in nature and produced diverse findings. There were noted methodological issues in the majority of interventions reviewed.

This original research has demonstrated clear need for research that uses robust methodology accounting for the complex and challenging nature of this context.

This paper aims to present a critical appraisal of Ghassan Kanafani’s short story “The Child Goes to the Camp” using the Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and Rose (2007) in an attempt to investigate the predicament of the Palestinians who were forced to flee their country and live in refugee camps as well as the various effects refugee life had on them.

Using the Appraisal Theory, and with a special focus on the categories of Attitude and Graduation, the paper aims to shed light on the plight of refugees through revealing the narrator’s suffering in a refugee camp where the most important virtue becomes remaining alive.

Analysing the story using the Appraisal Theory reveals the impact refugee life has left on the narrator and his family. This story serves as a warning for the world of the suffering refugees have to endure when they are forced to flee their war-torn countries.

Although Kanafani’ resistance literature has been studied extensively, his short stories have not received much scholarly attention. In addition, his works have not been subject to linguistic analysis. This study presents an appraisal analysis of Kanafani’s “The Child Goes to the Camp” in an attempt to investigate how the author’s linguistic choices are key to highlighting the suffering of the Palestinians, especially children, in refugee camps.

To better understand states’ technologies of violence, colonisation, and military occupation, this chapter shares Jerusalemite children’s written and spoken opposition to the mundane yet intimate governance of Israel’s ‘combat proven’ politics over their lives. ‘Combat proven’ politics are forms of surveillance, strategies of control, imprisonment, torture, murder, and techniques of managing colonised populations that are mobilised in service of the state. Combat proven politics turn children’s everyday spaces into a ‘show room’ – a living laboratory – for states, arms companies, and security agencies (both private and public) to market their technologies as ‘tested positively’. As sites of violence proliferate in these contexts, children are folded into the testing ground of ‘combat proven’ politics, intensifying and incentivising infrastructural warfare. Occupied East Jerusalem, where the children in this study live, acutely illustrates how combat proven politics is driven by a concentration of biopolitics, geopolitics (including the topography of settlement and colonial architecture), and necropolitics. At the same time, children’s language of life subverts the logic of the death machines.

Describes how educational media company Sesame Workshop has applied research to the development and evaluation of children’s TV programming; Sesame Workshop was the creator in 1969 of the “Sesame Street” TV series, which intentionally blended entertainment and education, and it has now teamed up with Applied Research and Consulting LLC (ARC). Explains the historical background to television research, and the development by Sesame Workshop and ARC of New Kid City, a prototype media environment for children, and later of Noggin, an interactive “place to go” with a website and children’s TV channel. Illustrates the application of the Sesame Workshop approach in one of its programmes, “Rechov Sumsum/Shara’a Simsim”, which is aimed at Israeli and Arab/Palestinian children.

One of the most affected groups during the COVID-19 pandemic was health-care providers due to the direct and continuous exposure to the virus and a lack of sufficient medical equipment. Palestinian health-care providers were exposed to several challenges related to their work environment as they worked in war-like conditions; therefore, this study aims to explore health-care providers’ perceptions, perspectives, challenges and human rights-related concerns during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine.

The sample comprised 30 health-care providers 26–35 years, who were purposively selected from among health-care providers in two Palestinian cities, Nablus and Tulkarm, located in the north of the West Bank. Thematic content analysis was applied to transcripts of interviews with the practitioners to identify key themes.

The thematic content analysis showed that the pandemic and quarantine negatively affect the mental health outcomes, daily routine and social relations of health-care providers. The main challenges related to human rights violations and faced by the health-care providers include a lack of sufficient infrastructure, lack of medical equipment’s and protective gear, military occupation and a shortage of health-care providers in general, especially those who practice in speciality fields such as neurology, oncology, pediatric surgery and clinical psychology.

Further investigations are recommended to test different variables related to health-care providers’ work during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper also recommends conducting studies targeting Palestinian health-care providers’ training and supervision services to improve their skills and resiliency in dealing with future crises.

The present work is the first to examine health-care providers’ perceptions, perspectives, challenges and human rights concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic in Palestine. This novel sample resides in a political and social environment characterized by high environmental stressors due to decades of military and political violence (e.g. militarization, poverty, lack of employment opportunities, cultural pressures, human rights violations, etc.)

Social media platforms are increasingly receiving attention as legitimate locations for civil society discourse and social movement mobilization. Initial work by Lovejoy and Saxton suggests NGOs use digital platforms such as Twitter to engage their constituencies through information dissemination, community building, and mobilization to action. Here, we explore the applicability of Lovejoy and Saxton’s communicative functions framework to resistance movement behavior by exploring two examples of digital engagement in political conflict. Through content analysis of tweets using hashtag indicators #BDS and #ICC4Israel collected during the spring of 2015, we affirm Lovejoy and Saxton’s findings that information dissemination is the most prevalent communication function for grassroots and institutionally grounded movements. Further, we find that informational tweets in our sample often provide information about grievances, and therefore propose an expansion of the framework to accommodate tweets that may be more common in resistance movements than in NGO communication. In addition to general findings about the communicative functions framework, the content analysis yielded several findings specific to the resistance movements studied. Notably, we find that #BDS and #ICC4Israel tweets are overwhelmingly nonviolent, and that sentiment is generally favorable across both hashtags, with the exception of tweets focusing on academic boycott, which were more ambiguous.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has devastating effects around the world, influencing daily life and putting communities into unprecedented situations of anxiety, hardship and loss. It has a particularly severe effect on the mental health of individuals and highlights pre-existing challenges in mental health provision in different countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mental health response to COVID-19 in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) in relation to mental health concerns and the political situation.

This study analyzes the double struggle of Palestinians not only dealing with COVID-19 but with the ongoing Israeli occupation and human rights violations and focuses on the challenges in providing mental health services due to existing inequalities, systemic discrimination and lack of resources as a result of the political system of oppression. The findings are based on previously published articles concerning mental health related to the COVID-19 outbreak in other countries, as well as the authors’ clinical experience in the oPt and direct involvement in providing mental health services.

The paper highlights how the current pandemic is being used to further attempts of annexation and political gains in Israel and how it exacerbated human rights violations due to the occupation. Emphasis is also put on the challenges in providing a Palestinian mental health response due to the high number of actors involved and the lack of preparedness at the level of mental health response provision.

The value of the works lies in putting the current pandemic in relation to human rights violations in the oPt due to the ongoing Israeli occupation and in highlighting how a mental health response to COVID-19 can be implemented during a state of emergency and despite a lack of preparedness in response services in the oPt.

This study aims to explore the effect of mental health in terms of depression, anxiety, stress, fear of COVID-19 and quality of life (QoL) on the reluctance to be vaccinated in a population of Palestinian adults living in occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.

The authors recruited 1,122 Palestinian adults who consented to participate in the study; 722 were females, and the mean age of the sample was 40.83 (SD 8.8). Depression, anxiety, and stress scale (DASS), World Health Organization QoL-BREF, FCov-19 and reluctance to the vaccine scale were administered; hierarchical regression analysis was applied to test vaccine reluctance as a dependent variable, and mental health, fear of COVID-19 and QoL as independent variables. This study hypothesized influence of such variables on the vaccine choice with differences due to the participants’ geographical locations.

Findings showed an effect of mental health, particularly depression, QoL and fear of COVID on vaccine reluctance, with depression and fear of COVID in the West Bank and Gaza, while in Israel, QoL played a role in vaccination choices.

The future needs to be comprehended more thoroughly to discover mutations and fluctuations over time in vaccine hesitancy and the increasing role of psychological distress, diminished QoL and fear of Covid-19. Online recruitment might not have allowed the study to include the most disadvantaged strips of the Palestinian population.

Human rights perspectives must be considered in public health and public mental health policies to ensure the QoL and well-being for the Palestinian population during and following the pandemic.

The crumbling of the Palestinian health-care system exacerbated the sense of dread among the population and made them less likely to vaccinate. The pandemic-like spread of Covid-19 prompts a plea for the global community to actively advocate for the urgent re-establishment of equity, autonomy and durability of the medical infrastructure in the occupied territories and equal entitlements for the Palestinians in Israel.

The results demonstrated the importance for public mental health to consider the multiple levels implied in the vaccine refusal in Palestine and Israel among the Palestinian population.