The Palestinian people who are resisting colonial violence and occupation to attain liberation and dignity are being massacred, terrorized and annihilated by the Israeli occupation military with the blessing and funding of the so-called Western civilized governments. We, the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network unequivocally condemn the intentional loss of lives, and assert our ethical commitment to upholding humanity and standing against ongoing violence and the ongoing erasure of our people.
We the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network are appalled by the complicity of the international community in the ongoing atrocity.
As of Friday, October 13th, 2023 the encouragement and collusion of these powers with Israel have supported:
● The 17-year siege on the Gaza Strip and all its 2.4 million civilian inhabitants who have been living in an open-air prison, and are 24/7 unmercifully attacked and bombarded by air, sea and land.
● Continuing, for the seventh time, the use of our people in Gaza as human targets, who are killed, maimed and displaced indiscriminately. All occurring under the gaze of the international community who selectively uphold international law.
● Since October 7th, 2023, the Israeli military admitted to targeting the people of Gaza with over 4000 tons of ammunition.
● 1600 men, women and children were killed and more than 6000 maimed by Israel’s continuous raids. Seventy-one families with all its members have been completely annihilated and erased from the human registry.
● More than 3000 buildings have been destroyed, 360,000 people internally displaced (with numbers growing) as Israel with Western governments’ complicity have “called” an estimated 1.1 million people to leave their homes or face annihilation.
● No electricity, water, food, or fuel, has been allowed to enter Gaza, leaving our people to starve and die.
● No medical supplies are available to attend to the increasing needs of the injured and the sick, and the Red Cross warned that as Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, and “without power, hospitals risk turning into morgues.”
● In October 2023 Israeli politicians are calling to “send Gaza to the stone ages”, for “carpet bombing”, and throwing our people out of Gaza.
The bombardment and massacres in Gaza against 2.4 million, is a continuation of the 1948 pogroms committed against Palestinians, which continue to occur against Palestinians across all parts of historic Palestine. We the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network (PGMHN) attest that incarcerating millions, subjecting them to unending daily violence, trapping them in violent spatialities within an apartheid regime, and constructing them as “human animals” results in the physical, psychological, and spiritual terrorizing atmosphere that can not go without resistance.
Siege is not only a material and economic reality, it also carries a heavy psychological toll, perpetrating emotional hardships, devastation, anxieties, terrorization, and desperation, leaving our people with no possibilities for life. Confining and condemning Palestinians in animalistic terms relegates them into psychologically imagined realms of sub-humanity, an age-old and intolerable racist logic that animates colonialism and its attendant machinery of violence. When international discourse upholds these racist logics and blames Palestinians for the oppression they face, this further creates the conditions ripe for genocide to unfold. We must all speak loudly against these discourses, practices, and legitimizations that are circulating widely and consequently shaping international policies supporting Zionist violence, rather than supporting Palestinian access to the right to life, to liberation and access to well-being and dignity.
We, the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, condemn international complicity and violence, that grants Israel the moral authority to commit crimes against humanity with impunity. We call on international actors to stop the widespread hyper-dehumanization and the unconditional racialized endorsement across international politics, from the Nakba period of 1948 to present-day October 2023.
This is a critical moment, an opportunity for all to take a moral, conscientious, and informed stand. You can intervene to immediately STOP the killing, starvation, ongoing brutalities, the siege, the power cut, and the ongoing traumatic uprooting of Palestinians.
Speak out, refuse, reject settler colonialism, and call for life. As the assassinated Palestinian author and thinker Ghassan Kanafani reminds us, “We will not be brought down by guns, but by our silence.”
We the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network (PGMHN) call for an IMMEDIATE END to the genocide in Gaza.
We urge our supporters and allies to:
● Become critical consumers of media and actively challenge the media’s portrayal and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
● Use your social media platforms to tell the world about the situation in Palestine.
