Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights

The Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights is an academic hub engaging in a broadly collaborative justice and rights-based approach in the study of Palestinian health through knowledge production, education, and multidisciplinary community engagement. Addressing the drivers of health inequities for Palestinians requires a multidisciplinary approach across the fields of public health, human rights, law, politics, history, and the social sciences. The Palestine Program’s cross-disciplinary engagement seeks to produce scholarship aimed at elucidating and addressing the structural determinants of health for Palestinians in the occupied territory, Israel, and the diaspora and supporting the next generation of public health and medical practitioners committed to improving the future of Palestinian health.

The Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights is a collaboration between the FXB Center and the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University that utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement. This framework involves surfacing, examining, and working to dismantle power dynamics and structures that perpetuate inequities in knowledge production and dissemination between Global North and Global South institutions.

2025 Health and Human Rights Fellow

Rania Muhareb, PhD, LLM, is the 2025 Palestine Health and Human Rights Postdoctoral Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the right to health in Palestine, drawing on the UN Apartheid Convention and Genocide Convention and the settler colonialism framework. She recently completed her PhD at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in the School of Law at the University of Galway (2020-2024). Funded by the Irish Research Council and Hardiman PhD scholarship, her doctoral research examined the mobilisation of the apartheid framework by grassroots organisers and human rights organisations in the pursuit of international justice and accountability in Palestine. Prior to this, she worked as a legal researcher and advocacy officer with the leading Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq (2017-2020). 

Rania is a policy member of Al-Shabaka – the Palestinian Policy Network, a member of Al-Shabaka’s editorial committee, and has a decade of experience in human rights, legal research, and advocacy in Palestine. She has authored and co-authored numerous articles, including in the Health and Human Rights Journal, Institute for Palestine Studies, Statelessness and Citizenship Review, República y Derecho, Middle East Policy, The Lancet, and BMJ, in addition to legal blogs and media articles. She has presented her research at academic conferences, workshops, seminars, and in guest lectures mainly focusing on apartheid and international law in Palestine.

Based at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, this fully funded one year fellowship provides an exceptional candidate with protected time, community, and resources to pursue their innovative work related to the health of Palestinians.

Follow the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights on X @PalestinePHHR.