Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights Projects

Terraced hills with stone walls, low houses and vibrant green trees, such as cypresses, against blue sky.
Battir, Palestine – UNESCO World Heritage Site. Credits: Cecilia Zhao

Featured voices

Health for Palestine (H4P) community health workers (CHWs) are members of refugee communities who provide long term treatment for community members suffering from chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and hypertension, community health education, and patient accompaniment in accessing health care services in the Aida and Balata refugee camps. Dr. Bram Wispelwey discusses how H4P was created, the critical health needs it fills, and his role training and support community health workers. Mohammed Abu Dayeh, one of the community health workers Dr. Wispelwey trained, was featured in a New York Times video following his injury while providing care.

Please click here to view.
Photo of Dr. Bram Wispelwey and colleagues looking at rubble in the West Bank.
Salam, a fifth-year medical student at Al-Azhar University which was a target of bombardment, talks about the difficulties she faces as a student and describes the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, November 2023.

Please click here to view.
Image of colorful map focusing on Gaza and Israel.

Health and Human Rights Webinar Series

Please click here to view a full list of our past webinars.
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights logo, Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights logo, The Center for Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University logo, Harvard Divinity School Religion and Public Life - Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative logo, Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Birzeit University logo. Webinar: Targeting Health: Detention, torture, and attacks on Palestinian healthcare workers. Moderator: A. Kayum Ahmed, PhD, LLM, Program Lead for the Global Health Initiative, Human Rights Watch; Milena Ansari, LLM, Israel and Palestine Assistant Researcher, Human Rights Watch; Muath Alser, Physician, Co-founder and Director, Healthcare Workers Watch; Osaid Alser, MD, MSc (Oxon), General Surgery Trainee, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
Health and Human Rights Journal logo

Health and Human Rights Journal Special Edition on Palestinian Health

This special edition on Palestinian Health aims to explore the conceptual and material connections between settler colonialism and health in the Palestinian context. Themes include the manifestations of settler colonialism such as apartheid, the logic of elimination, and Palestinians’ right to health.  Papers explore themes that include:

• The implications of integrating a framework of apartheid, settler colonialism, or structural racism with the HRBA to Palestinian health and wellbeing
• Decolonial and/or anticolonial means of achieving the right to health within the current Palestinian context
• The impacts of systemic, structural, or direct racism on the health of Palestinians
Read the HHRJ Special Section here
City of Jerusalem and Dome of Rock visible beyond concrete wall

The Past, Present, and Future of Palestinian Health: A Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar

The political prospects for Palestinians have never been more dire, with inevitable downstream impacts on health. While international community engagement that lacks a structural analytic approach risks exacerbating root causes of Palestinian ill health, depoliticized and humanitarian interventions remain the norm. In response to seemingly intractable structural barriers, the Radcliffe workshop seeks to contribute a broadly collaborative justice- and rights-based approach to improving and uplifting Palestinian health.

In this workshop, a small cohort of experts from a variety of backgrounds and specialties including health, human rights, law, social sciences, anthropology, history, and activism will convene to discuss and develop a critical analysis of the current state of affairs, develop consensus statements and publications on the root causes of Palestinian health, and outline a radical future vision for the health of all Palestinians. A joint statement made by participants in the Radcliffe Seminar can be found here. A publication of the statement by Jadaliyya Reports can be found here.

Intensive Social Medicine Course in Palestine

Social Medicine Course

The Palestine Social Medicine course brings together a multidisciplinary cadre of Palestinian and Harvard students for an experiential learning experience in Palestine. The course offers both conceptual and practical engagement with the structural determinants of health affecting Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel, and the Diaspora. The Palestine Social Medicine Course occurs annually at Birzeit University in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territories. It includes travel throughout the West Bank and Israel for site visits focused on evaluating the range of health care available, as well as the variable social conditions which contribute to and determine health outcomes.

To supplement existing coursework, the social medicine framework offers a progressive approach to educating on the social and structural determinants of health. The Palestine course builds on the expertise, experience, and curricula of EqualHealth’s successful annual social medicine courses in Uganda, Haiti, and the United States, which over the last few years have trained hundreds of health professional students from these countries and beyond to both understand and respond to the social determinants of health.

The specific objectives of the course include:

  1. Educate Palestinian and Harvard health professional students on the social determinants of health in Palestine and other settings
  2. Integrate lectures and field visits into a comprehensive and dynamic learning experience
  3. Develop student appreciation for the need to be historically deep and geographically broad in their approach to understanding the complexities of health inequity
  4. Build a growing network of structurally competent health professionals to address and champion Palestinian health

Applications for the 2025 cohort of the summer course are closed.

Return to the main page of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights.