WHO Health Emergency Appeal 2026 — one million people needing mental health support

The single most citable figure for the scale of the mental health need in Gaza comes from the World Health Organization’s Health Emergency Appeal for 2026, published on 3 February 2026. Its context section states: “The mental health toll of the conflict is profound, with an estimated one million people in need of mental health and psychosocial support.”

The figure is worth holding against the rest of the same paragraph, because a mental health need is not a free-standing condition. In the same document, and as of December 2025, WHO records that more than 2.9 million people across the occupied Palestinian territory require humanitarian health assistance; that “over 71 000 people have been killed and more than 171 000 people have been injured, of whom 25% have suffered life-changing injuries”; that “nearly the entire population of 2.1 million people has been repeatedly displaced, with the majority now confined to less than half of the Gaza Strip”; that “all 36 hospitals and the majority of primary health care centres” have been damaged and “over 930 attacks on health have been recorded”; that only half of hospitals are partially functional and “just 48% of primary health care centres remain operational”; and that “an estimated 81% of all structures across the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed.”

On the West Bank the appeal is briefer and no less serious: between October 2023 and December 2025 “more than 1100 Palestinians were killed and over 920 attacks on health care were recorded”, 63% of primary health care centres are only partially functional, “opening an average of one day per week, down from six days prior to 2023”, and “mental health and psychosocial needs are acute, particularly among children and youth.”

What this figure is and is not. It is a humanitarian planning estimate of people in need of mental health and psychosocial support — the category that drives an appeal — not a clinical prevalence of diagnosed disorder, and WHO does not present it as one. Cite it as what it is. It is also, on WHO’s own account, a need arising in a place where the services that would meet it have been destroyed: a number and its own refutation in the same sentence.

Why it matters

• An institutional, dated, quotable figure from the UN’s own health agency, for the scale of the psychological injury.
• It sets the mental health need inside the material conditions producing it — displacement, destroyed housing, a broken health system — rather than abstracting it into a caseload.
• The West Bank paragraph is the answer to anyone who treats the psychological cost as a Gaza-only question.

Key resources

• Occupied Palestinian Territory: WHO Health Emergency Appeal 2026 (UNISPAL)
• The appeal on WHO’s own site