In November 2023, ECPA issued a statement calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people. What we have been witnessing since then is an appalling escalation of the genocide, which we, as community psychologists committed to social justice, vehemently repudiate.
Over the last months, there has been an unacceptable deterioration of the living conditions of the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, resulting in 50,000 civilians reportedly killed and countless of children injured or killed, since October 2023. Furthermore, Israel has inflicted severe harm and destruction to civilian life-sustaining infrastructures, including healthcare and educational infrastructures, continuous waves of forced displacement, enhanced risk of famine, humanitarian aid blockade, and has destroyed medical supplies. Border crossings into Gaza have been closed for the last two months, and all attempts by humanitarian agencies and civil society organisations to bring essential aid inside have been restrained by the Israeli government. Simultaneously, UN humanitarian agencies declared that the current arrangement of aid distribution in Gaza has become “a death trap”, with mass casualties reported.
Recently, activists from around the world joined the Global March to Gaza and the boat of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition—both grassroots initiatives aimed at breaking Israel’s suffocating siege and enabling the delivery of aid and humanitarian supplies to Gaza’s starving population. We, too, seek to use our privilege as community-engaged practitioners and scholars to reaffirm the importance of naming and speaking out against the ongoing genocide and the decades-long occupation.
The decades-long settler colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people have reached unbearable levels of brutality and cruelty, demanding urgent and unwavering global action to end these atrocities. As community psychologists, we cannot stand silent as we watch this genocide continuing to unfold, exposing the moral failures of our international community, and particularly of Western governments. As recently highlighted by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967: “While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide.” The Palestinian people have the right to a future and their land; they cannot suffer blatant violations of their human rights and their dignity any longer. Humanitarian aid agencies and solidarity groups must be allowed to enter Gaza and work in safety and security. As European community psychologists, we call for full respect for the Palestinian people’s human, civil, and political rights, as well as their right to peace and self-determination.