Search Results (7)

Background and Objectives: The current war on the Gaza strip and the circulating violent content is believed to negatively impact the mental health of the Palestinians living in refugee camps outside their homeland. This study explores the prevalence and correlates of depression, anxiety, and insomnia in a cohort of female Palestinian refugees in Jordan who have family members entangled in the persistent conflict in the Gaza strip. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study employed validated tools to assess depression, anxiety, and insomnia in women residing in a Gaza camp located in Jerash, Jordan. The correlates were determined by regression analysis. Results: The study unearths disconcerting statistics from 177 recruited women, revealing alarmingly high rates of severe depression (73%), anxiety (60%), and insomnia (65%). Multivariable analysis revealed that severe depression was significantly associated with prior diagnosis with chronic diseases (OR = 3.0, CI = 1.36–6.58), and having a first-degree relative in Gaza (OR = 0.42, CI = 0.20–0.85). Additionally, severe insomnia was associated with “losing relatives or friends in the war” (OR = 3.01, CI = 1.41–6.44), and “losing connection with families and friends” (OR = 3.89, CI = 1.58–9.53). Conclusions: The implications of these results are profound, underscoring the immediate and imperative need for both medical and psychiatric interventions aimed at addressing the substantial psychological burden borne by this population because of the ongoing conflict. Full article

Shatila camp in Beirut was founded in 1949 and now houses up to 40,000 refugees. In 2017, the Peirene Press publisher Meike Ziervogel and London-based Syrian editor Suhir Hedal travelled to the camp to hold a three-day creative writing workshop in which nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees participated. The result is Shatila Stories (2018), a brilliant piece of collaborative fiction translated from Arabic to English by Naswa Gowanlock. It is a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection, in which refugee voices are given the chance to speak up, share their stories, and negotiate their identities. This article examines Shatila Stories (2018) as a book that highlights Shatila as a campscape (Diana Martín). These stories show that the camp, as Adam Ramadan argues, is not empty of law and political life, but rather it is a meaningful space produced by who and what is in it, and how they interrelate and interact. Shatila Stories is, indeed, an effective platform that allows readers to understand how refugees’ conflicts and thoughts are processed and the ways in which refugees in Shatila accept and embody the camp’s liminality and their border subject identity to gain agency and resist the restrained passivity to which they are often relegated. Ultimately, my analysis pays attention to how these stories encourage the renegotiation of the refugees’ selfhood and counter Agamben’s perception of refugees as “bare lives” by portraying them as autonomous, active and humanized individuals in the eyes of the international reader. Full article

COVID-19 is an emerging respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus accompanied by a tsunami of misinformation and fake news. This can weaken the public health responses by affecting the COVID-19-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) of the public. Therefore, this cross-sectional study was designed during the early stage of the pandemic to evaluate the KAP of Palestinian university students and their commonly used information sources. We found that the most trusted information source among students was the World Health Organization (WHO), followed by the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) briefings and healthcare workers, whereas social media was the most frequently used source of information. The participants exhibited a high level of COVID-19-related knowledge, having an average score of 8.65 (range: 0–10). In total, 76% avoided going to crowded places, and only 33% wore a mask while being outdoors. The vast majority (93%) checked the accuracy of COVID-19-related information before publishing it, 56% used the WHO and MoH briefings for fact-checking, and only 8% relied on healthcare workers. This was particularly the case for those who lived in refugee camps. This study provides an insight into the information sources used by Palestinian university students, the sources they trust, and the information formats they prefer. These results may help public health authorities to locate the information sources through which university students should be targeted. Efforts should be made to recommend healthcare workers as credible information sources. In this way, they will be able to prevent the spread of misleading information and provide high-quality information, especially within unconventional settings such as refugee camps. Full article

Neuropsychological studies on refugee children are scarce, but there are even less in the case of Palestinian children. This work aims to study the neuropsychological performance of Palestinian refugee children in Palestine compared to other Palestinian children living outside refugee camps. A comprehensive Neuropsychological battery was administrated to 584 Palestinian school children (464 refugees and 120 non-refugees) aged 6, 7, and 8 years old. Results showed that non-refugee children outperformed refugee children in sustained attention, verbal comprehension, verbal memory, and visual memory. This study is the first to have performed a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, based on a standardized and validated battery with the Palestinian refugee children. It supports professionals in their evaluation of neurodevelopment and neuropsychological alterations in refugee and non-refugee children in Palestine. Full article

In this study, a total of 335 Palestinian refugees (M = 15.5 years, SD = 1.05, 49% males), recruited from four United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) schools at the Al-Baqa’a and Jabal Al-Hussein refugee camps in Jordan, rated their neighborhood physical environment and neighborhood support and cohesion, separately rated their mothers’ and fathers’ parenting on several dimensions, and reported on their adjustment to these circumstances (internalizing symptoms, self-concept clarity, and norm breaking). Living in more dangerous physical environments was associated with higher levels of refugee youths’ internalizing symptoms and norm breaking, but effects were not significant when parenting was considered. Our study showed that higher levels of psychological control–disrespect (significantly for fathers and marginally for mothers) and marginally, higher levels of maternal harsh punishment were associated with more teen internalizing symptoms. In addition, fathers’ greater psychological control and lower levels of support had a marginally significant effect on teens’ greater norm breaking. For behavioral control, only mothers’ greater behavioral control was associated with refugee youths’ greater self-concept clarity but not with paternal behavioral control. Thus, fathers’ psychological control and mothers’ behavioral control had the biggest association with adolescent outcomes. Full article

We investigated the quality of treated drinking water in Aida Camp and Alazzah Camp, two Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. Water supply in the two camps is intermittent: Water deliveries are first stored in a centrally located community tank before being pumped through distribution networks to users, who then store the water in rooftop tanks. Between March 2016 and June 2017, we examined water quality within the distribution system in the camps, testing 520 samples in Aida Camp and 198 samples in Alazzah Camp for total coliforms, Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria, and residual chlorine. We observed deterioration in water quality in both camps, but the deterioration was more pronounced in Aida Camp where 2.5% of community-tank samples, 5.0% of network samples, and 10% of rooftop-tank samples contained one or more colonies (per 100 mL) of total coliform bacteria. In Alazzah Camp, 3.7% of community-tank samples, 2.5% of network samples, and 5% rooftop-tank samples contained one or more colonies (per 100 mL) of total coliform bacteria. E. coli was detected in two samples from Aida Camp and one sample from Alazzah Camp. In both camps, average residual chlorine concentrations were higher in the community tanks than in rooftop tanks. The main factor influencing water quality deterioration in rooftop tanks in Aida Camp appears to be air temperature. We recommend more systematic water testing in the camps and greater transparency in reporting test results to camp residents. Full article

‘Space of Refuge’ is a spatial installation directly addressing issues of inhabitation within Palestinian refugee camps in different host countries. It does so by illustrating the various modes of spatial production and subsequent evolution of Palestinian refugee camps, with particular focus upon unofficial acts of “spatial violation” that have emerged because of the increasingly protracted nature of the refugee situation. Full article