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.
Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights Projects
Palestine Social Medicine Intensive Summer Course
In August 2024, the program hosted the Second Annual Palestine Social Medicine Course in Amman, Jordan, in collaboration with the World Health Organization – office for the occupied Palestinian territory. The course’s primary objective is to foster a critical understanding of the social and structural determinants of health within Palestinian society.
A total of 28 students from the United States and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region participated in the course. The U.S.-based participants included students and professionals from fields such as medicine, public health, and anthropology. The MENA cohort included students from Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. Read about the 2024 course here.
2023-2024 Health and Human Rights Fellow
Sawsan Abdulrahim, PhD, MPH (she/her) was hosted by the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights as the program’s inaugural in-residence Health and Human Rights Fellow. Dr. Abdulrahim’s work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. Her substantive research areas include migration and health; the syndemic of early marriage and mental distress in forced displacement; and aging and the wellbeing of women migrant care workers.
Applications for the 2024-2025 fellowship are now closed.
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.
Palestine Health Research Fund
Programming Areas
Knowledge Production
Education
Community Engagement
Follow the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights on X @PalestinePHHR.
Recent Publications & Press
UNRWA’s work is at risk again, The Lancet, November 20, Yara M. Asi (Co-Author)
US-made MK-84 bombs in Gaza may prove humanitarian law violations: Harvard study (Dennis Kunichoff quoted, Anadolu Agency, October 23, 2024)
“Communicating for well-being: Overlapping principles in peace and health communication.” Connaughton, S.L., & Pukallus, S. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peace Communication (1st ed.). Routledge, October 28, 2024, Yara M. Asi (Chapter Author)
News update: Polio vaccinations continue in Gaza, PPHHR mentioned, October 15, 2024.
Are hospitals collateral damage? Assessing geospatial proximity of 2000 lb bomb detonations to hospital facilities in the Gaza Strip from October 7 to November 17, 2023, PLOS Global Public Health, October 10, Dennis Kunichoff, David Mills ,Yara Asi, Sawsan Abdulrahim, Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, Weeam Hammoudeh, Nadine Bahour, Mary T. Basset (Co-Authors)
Israeli military dropped 2,000-pound bombs in “dangerous proximities” to nearly all hospitals in Gaza, study finds (Dennis Kunichoff quoted, CNN World, October 9, 2024)
Polio in Gaza: Experts explain the outbreak and the public health response (Mary T. Bassett quoted, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Featured News Stories 2024, October 3, 2024)
The humanitarian system: politics can not be avoided, The Lancet, September 2024, Yara M. Asi (Co-Author)
Social Medicine Education towards Structural Transformation in Palestine, Social Science & Medicine, September 18, David Mills, Bram Wispelwey, Yara M. Asi, Osama Tanous, Weeam Hammoudeh (Co-Authors)
Children in Gaza will be protected from polio but not Israel’s airstrikes (Yara M. Asi authored, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), September 6, 2024)
Unbearable suffering: mental health consequences of the October 2023 Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip, BMJ Global Health, August 2024, Weeam Hammoudeh (Co-Author)
Beyond the Battlefield, War Is a Public Health Crisis (Yara M. Asi authored, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), August 14, 2024)
Rethinking and advancing the movement of resistance, activism, and advocacy in health in four central arenas of the Middle East Region, World Medical & Health Policy, 2024, Yara M. Asi (Co-Author)
Water War Crimes: How Israel has weaponised water in its military campaign in Gaza (Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights Conflict and Health article “Nowhere and no one is safe” cited, Oxfam Briefing Paper, July 18)
Assessing the Universality of Universal Health Coverage: Israel and the Occupation of Palestine, Palestine/Israel Review, August 2, Yara M. Asi (Co-Author)
Understanding the Real Toll of Israel’s Assault on Gaza (Yara M. Asi authored, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), July 24, 2024)
Webinar: The destruction of healthcare in Gaza and the scientific assessment of settler colonial violence (Bram Wispelwey, Dennis Kunichoff, Sawsan Abdulrahim, A. Kayum Ahmed mentioned, Mondoweiss, July 14, 2024)
Displacement Is the Point: Contextualizing Israel’s Decades of Violence and Destruction in Gaza and the West Bank (Yara M. Asi authored, The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Peace, June 27, 2024)
Psychological and Social Suffering of Another Generation of Palestinian Children Living under Occupation: An Urgent Call to Advocate, Health and Human Rights Journal, June 2024, Sawsan Abdulrahim (Co-Author)
Racism as a Threat to Palestinian Health Equity, Health Equity, Accepted April 10, Yara M. Asi, Bram Wispelwey, A. Kayum Ahmed (Co-Authors)
The Locations of Palestine and the U.S. in the Global Map of Homelessness: Part 1, International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, June 14, Osama Tanous (Co-Author)
Saint Levant’s Memories of Gaza (FXB Center referenced, Paper, June 13, 2024)
The Locations of Palestine and the U.S. in the Global Map of Homelessness: Part 2, International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, June 11, Osama Tanous (Co-Author)
Gaza demands a new kind of humanitarian action (Yara M. Asi authored, The New Humanitarian, May 30, 2024)
The US Medical Establishment Is Making One of Its Worst Mistakes—Again (Mary T. Bassett co-authored, The Nation, May, 21, 2024)
Civilian mortality and damage to medical facilities in Gaza (Bram Wispelwey, David Mills, Yara M. Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, Dennis Kunichoff, A. Kayum Ahmed mentioned, ReliefWeb, May 17, 2024)
Civilian mortality and damage to medical facilities in Gaza, BMJ Global Health, Accepted January 2, Bram Wispelwey, David Mills, Yara M. Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, Dennis Kunichoff, A. Kayum Ahmed (Co-Authors)