Palestine-Global Mental Health Network
Published in Counterpunch, January, 17, 2025
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The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network and its international counterparts embrace the ceasefire agreed upon on January 15, 2025, with hearts both heavy and hopeful. In Gaza, amidst the rubble and unimaginable loss, our people are rejoicing. Their joy is a testament to the indomitable spirit of survival and hope. Yet, we know too well that this ceasefire, like those before it, is fragile. Israel’s repeated violations of past agreements leave us wary, and even if the bombings cease, the siege remains—a suffocating blockade that denies Palestinians the most basic means to rebuild their lives. We recall Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah’s statement that even post-ceasefire, “Israel and Western governments … will try to continue the genocide … The destruction of the physical, biological, and social in Gaza has created a biosphere capable of self-sustaining the genocidal erasure through disease and injury…”

As we witness this moment of relief, we grieve deeply for the martyrs. Their lives—80 martyred yesterday, January 15, 2025, journalists assassinated for their bravery, and countless others erased by the carnage—are stark reminders of an unyielding genocide. The world must understand: this genocide did not begin on October 7, 2023. For over a century, Palestinians have been subjected to a relentless system of erasure.

It is a genocide that seeks to obliterate memory, as Israel wages memoricide, rewriting history to deny our existence. It is a genocide that seeks to annihilate our present, with bombings, imprisonments, and a deliberate strategy to make life unlivable. And most heartbreakingly, it is a genocide that targets our future—our children.

The testimonies from doctors returning from Gaza are seared into our minds: children shot in the head and chest, clear evidence of a shoot-to-kill policy. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the murder of Palestinian children has tripled. The Knesset has even passed laws sentencing children as young as 12 to life imprisonment. These are not isolated incidents; they are calculated acts of brutality. Palestinian children remain the only children in the world subjected to prosecution in military courts—robbed of their innocence, their rights, and their futures.

The violence is not limited to Gaza. Across Palestine—in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem—settlers terrorize our communities daily, emboldened by a system that shields them from accountability. The siege of Gaza, the theft of land, the destruction of homes, the targeting of children—these are all parts of the same machinery of oppression, designed to erase our people from history, from their land, and from existence itself.

To our supporters and all who stand for justice and humanity, we urge you to take action. Keep raising your voice for an arms embargo on Israel. Continue to support the Palestinian civil society’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

Join the No Child A Target campaign and help us reach one million signatures on our petition. Over half a million people have already signed—add your voice to demand an end to the violence against Palestinian children.

We also encourage you to write to U.S. policymakers through the No Child A Target letter campaign. (Go to No Child A Target letter campaign. If a pop-up message appears, close it to access the campaign). Let them know the world is watching, and we will not remain silent.

Palestinian children deserve to grow up with laughter instead of tears, with dreams instead of nightmares, with freedom instead of fear. They deserve a future. We owe it to them, to the martyrs, and to generations yet to come to fight for justice, for accountability, and for liberation.

Let us honor those we have lost by demanding a better world for those who remain. Let us stand together, unshaken and unyielding, in the struggle for Palestinian freedom.

Signed,

The Palestine Mental Health Networks