Letter from the faculty of the 2025 edition of the Global Mental Health and Human Rights Summer, following the bombing of the premises of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) whose director, Yasser Abu Jamei, was guest speaker at the Summer School.
26 September 2025
On September 22nd 2025, Israel bombed the offices of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) in Gaza City, Palestine. As a result, a building housing medical equipment and a training centre was destroyed along with seven residential apartments that provided psychological and social services to war victims and other members of the community, including children and those in crisis. This undermines ongoing humanitarian efforts to support civilians living in the harshest conditions under a continuing genocide. The targeting of the GCMHP compounds Israel’s previous damage or destruction of 94% of hospitals in Gaza, as reported by the UN in May 2025, along with the targeted killing of medical professionals, as with the Rafah paramedic massacre in March 2025. On 26 September, 2025 Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) announced the suspension of its activities and withdrawal from Gaza City due to its clinics being besieged by Israeli forces. The repeated threat and use of violence against medical professionals, health centres, and healthcare provision is both illegal and morally inexcusable.
We write as organizers, participants, and members of the 2025 Global Mental Health and Human Rights Summer School community at Venice International University. We stand in unwavering solidarity with our colleagues and friends at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), whose General Director was one of our distinguished keynote speakers of the summer school. We extend our deepest condolences and profound sorrow for the loss of innocent lives in the recent despicable attack by Israel, which forms part of the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health and educational institutions. We also express our heartfelt solidarity with colleagues and friends who have lost their workplace and who, once again, have been forced into dangerous and humiliating displacement due to the ferocious assault by Israel on Gaza City. Over the past two years, these attacks have not only claimed countless lives but have deliberately dismantled the infrastructures essential for collective survival, healing, and learning—amounting to acts of medicide, educide, cultural erasure, and the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.
We express our condemnation of these flagrant violations of International Law and the Geneva Convention by Israel. We call on Israel to cease its campaign of terror against medical professionals and civilians, as well as its ongoing apartheid against the State of Palestine. Further still, we call upon Israel to respect the ceasefire and allow desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and for the Global Sumud Flotilla to reach the Gaza port.
In solidarity,
Signed by the 2025 cohort of the Global Mental Health and Human Rights Summer School:
Lenia Dandouti
Chiara Fiscone
Guido Veronese
Gabriele Tapella
Tracy Sidesinger
Maudèz Ritter
Liam Hilton
Abdelrahman Badri
Ashraf Kagee
Alex Pieterse
Mohhadiah Rafique
Sarah Oosthuizen
María Guillot
Alex Freeman
Nuha Alshabani
Noorjehan Joosub
Sabine Saadeh
Kudakwashe Christopher Muchena
Margherita Busson
Paty Diaz
Terence Duffy
Salma Yusuf
Elise Christou
Sarah van der Walt
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
