"Anyone else struggling with work-genocide balance?" — Gaza, and the people watching it from outside

The title is a real question, asked in a WhatsApp group. The paper opens with it: “‘How is your work-genocide balance?’ a colleague asked us one November morning. She asks in a WhatsApp group where some participants are in a part of the world observing Gaza from afar, scrolling through Instagram between images of vacations in the Maldives and pictures of blood on sacks of flour… She asks this in a group where some participants are instead displaced to the south of Gaza, sheltered in a school, after witnessing the destruction of their homes, their universities, hospitals, and their cities.”

The study was published in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry on 22 October 2025 (vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 1372–1393; DOI 10.1007/s11013-025-09953-0). Its authors are at the University of Milano-Bicocca, An-Najah National University in Nablus, Bryn Mawr College, and the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in Gaza City. Thirty semi-structured interviews were conducted between early November 2023 and mid-June 2024: fifteen with people in and from the Gaza Strip, aged 20 to 56, 73% women, recruited through one author’s ability to move within Gaza; and fifteen with Italian clinical psychologists, psychotherapists and academics, aged 27 to 60, 67% women. Analysis was phenomenological and thematic. Approval: Milano-Bicocca IRB No. 776.

The order of the findings is the point, and this archive keeps it. The testimonies from Gaza come first and are not comparable to anything else in the paper. A 24-year-old woman in Rafah: “The hardest moment was not being under the rubble; it was waking up injured and being told that none of your family is here. I felt the physical pain of that; I felt my internal bleeding as if it were coming from my soul. It was a moment I will never forget. They ask me how I survived. Do you think I survived?” A 32-year-old woman displaced to Rafah, refusing the singular noun: “There are many wars here. There is the war of hunger, the war of epidemics and diseases, the war of cold, the war of food and water, the war of menstrual cycles, the war of giving birth in the school, the war of calming oneself in these conditions, the war of mourning. The war of being in the persistent cycle of fear of losing someone from your family. All these are wars. When we work on the impact of war, do we consider this?” And, on being watched: “I no longer talk to anyone [colleagues outside Gaza] about what I see because they are all busy with their lives. Our voice has become annoying and burdensome to the world.”

The second group is where the paper becomes useful for anyone outside. Its abstract reports that “witnesses from European contexts reported helplessness, disorientation, and moral injury, often struggling with their perceived complicity in global systems of oppression.” A 42-year-old woman in Europe: “How do we sleep at night while all this is happening? How do other people sleep at night?” A 35-year-old: “How do I maintain faith in humanity, function day to day, and not fall into a pit of depression while watching a genocide unfold and knowing that none of our governments truly denounce it? How do I not feel responsible? We are part of that side of the world that supports these colonial policies.” A 44-year-old man on the loss of a collective register for grief: “It is difficult to continue with your routine. I feel like I can’t talk to anyone about it… Mourning and loss need a collective aspect to be lived. I don’t have a community with which I can do this.” And on what would help: “I need to find a community where I can express it. Where we can grieve together, get angry together, activate together.”

A scope caution this archive will not skip. That second group is not the Palestinian diaspora. They were Italian citizens, selected precisely because they had expressed concern about Gaza “despite not having personal or professional connection with Palestinians or involvement in work on Palestine.” Anyone citing this paper as evidence about Palestinians abroad would be misusing it. The nearest thing the paper offers on that is its authors’ own account of themselves: two are researchers from Gaza, one displaced and out since April 2024 and one still in the north; another is a West Bank PhD student studying in Europe. Of the group they write that they “balance grief, guilt, and existential anxiety with the demands of productivity and the expectations of living an ‘ordinary life’”, and that “the heavy weight of personal ties to Gaza makes the experience of feeling like we are currently helpless observers of genocide unbearable.” That is a statement by named researchers about themselves, not a finding about a population, and should be cited as such.

Why it matters

• The only peer-reviewed study this archive has located that holds both experiences in one design without flattening the difference between them.
• It gives the condition of watching from outside a clinical name — moral injury — and a documented mechanism: complicity, institutional silence, and the absence of a community in which to grieve.
• It also supplies the correction to the misuse of that finding. The distress of the watcher is real and it is not the same thing, and the paper’s own testimonies from Rafah make the distinction impossible to blur.

Key resources

• “Anyone Else Struggling with Work-Genocide Balance?” Exploring the Psychological and Social Impact of Collective Annihilation in Gaza — full text