The West Bank is not a bystander — trauma among Palestinian undergraduates during the war on Gaza

Gaza absorbs the attention, and it should. But the West Bank has spent the same period under raids, settler attacks, closures and mass arrest, watching Gaza in real time, and the evidence that this has a measurable psychological cost now exists in the peer-reviewed record.

The study is “Mental health of Palestinian undergraduates during the War on Gaza: a cross-sectional study on PTSD, CPTSD, and psychological distress”, published in Scientific Reports on 27 March 2026 (DOI 10.1038/s41598-026-44892-9), open access. Six of its seven authors are at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem; the seventh is at Al al-Bayt University in Mafraq, Jordan. It surveyed 819 undergraduates recruited primarily at seven West Bank universities, with further participants from other accredited West Bank universities — Al-Quds, Birzeit, An-Najah National, Bethlehem, the Arab American University in Jenin, Palestine Polytechnic and Hebron — between 10 February and 6 April 2024, using the International Trauma Questionnaire and the GHQ-12.

The headline figures, as the paper reports them: “87.2% (95% CI: 84.7–89.4%) reported psychological distress”; “51.9% met criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, with 25.5% classified as PTSD-only and 26.4% as complex PTSD”; and 38.6% showed disturbances in self-organisation, the feature that distinguishes complex PTSD from PTSD.

The figure that should be read last, and hardest, is this one: 97.4% had not received specialist mental health support during the conflict period. (The same paper records 13.9% with a previous anxiety diagnosis, 10.9% depression and 4.2% PTSD, so this is a figure about specialist support during the war, not about lifetime contact with services.) Whatever the true prevalence of distress in the West Bank, the provision meeting it is, on this sample, close to nothing. That is not a finding about Palestinian attitudes to therapy. It is a finding about a health system operating under occupation and a fiscal crisis — the WHO reported in February 2026 that 63% of West Bank primary health care centres were only partially functional, opening on average one day a week, against six days before 2023.

A note on scope. These are university students: literate, enrolled, urban-weighted, and self-selected into an online survey. They are not a random sample of West Bank Palestinians and the paper does not claim they are. Read it as strong evidence about a large, definable population, not as a national prevalence estimate.

Why it matters

• Palestinian-authored, West Bank-based, and collected during the first months of the war rather than reconstructed afterwards.
• It distinguishes PTSD from complex PTSD using a validated instrument, which matters given how much of the Palestinian clinical argument turns on the inadequacy of the simple PTSD category.
• The 97.4% figure for specialist support during the conflict is the one that converts a psychological finding into a policy one.

Key resources

• Mental health of Palestinian undergraduates during the War on Gaza — full text
• WHO Health Emergency Appeal 2026, occupied Palestinian territory