Can health professionals effectively engage in "healing across the divides" in a setting of ongoing conflict?

ABSTRACT

Peace Building through Health (PtH) should be in decline. What with increasing attacks on health professionals, only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, and significant challenges to humanitarian aid in general over the past two decades, one would expect that fewer health professionals would be willing to put themselves in harm's way. And with more refugees in the world today than at any time since World War II, it would not be surprising if fewer health professionals proved willing to persist in a practice akin to banging their heads against a brick wall. But the reality is that health professionals will continue to respond to a moral calling to do this work even if some consider it quixotic or useless, let alone unnecessarily dangerous. For those of us health professionals who will at least try to mitigate the impact of conflicts and the humanitarian crises that emerge from them, the aim of this chapter is to outline recent challenges and opportunities in the PtH field, with a specific focus on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)