Trauma care needs among West Bank Palestinians are up dramatically over the past two years
Fortunately, the nonprofit Anar is up to the task
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — “Anar” is the Arabic word for “light up,” and the Bethlehem-based nonprofit is called that for a reason, Anar’s founder and executive director Rami Khader explained Thursday to a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) delegation who traveled to Israel-Palestine and Jordan to learn more from partners in the region and bring back the stories they’re telling.
Anar works on advancing the psychosocial wellbeing and resilience of children impacted by violence and oppression. It was formed in the summer of 2023. “The need was so clear,” Khader said from Anar’s administrative office in Beit Sahour. “Everyone has been going through a really hard time, and in a culture like ours, we don’t express what we go through very much.”
Anar doesn’t charge fees for its services and relies on funding from organizations and churches, including the PC(USA). Khader said the goal is “to provide healing where justice is not part of the lived experience. Instead of approaching it individually, let’s empower communities and offer them training.”
Khader is a Palestinian Christian, but the organization isn’t explicitly Christian. “But we feel in this land, in the place where Jesus walked 2,000 years ago, healing and providing hope and justice — we felt this was work we can do,” he said.
Anar has experienced rapid growth in the nearly 2½ years it’s been offering services by employing 14 staff members and training others to provide services in their specific neighborhoods.
From September through December in 2023, Anar worked with about 1,000 people. The next year it was almost 4,000 people, 60% of them children. Last year Anar served almost 10,000 beneficiaries.
It’s reached that level of service by creating community-based self-help hubs — mostly unemployed young adults with an undergraduate or graduate degree who receive training for 12 days. They then return to their community — a refugee camp, one of the villages around Bethlehem or the city itself. “Localization means not only Palestinians supporting Palestinians, but refugees serving refugees,” Khader said. “They understand the challenges, and they are the best ones to provide care.”
Last year, Anar expanded to begin serving in the southern part of the Hebron Hills, a community of about 12,000 people trapped in the middle of the desert without sufficient water and electricity. They’ve experienced violence from the Israeli military and from settlers. “Sometimes we can’t access the area, but the service never stops,” Khader said. “The staff’s role is to provide self-help facilitators,” many of whom “need enough support to listen to stories and handle it themselves.”
Anar has been working with many of the 40,000 refugees in the northern part of the West Bank who were kicked out of their homes in February and March 2025. What’s been difficult, he said, is the intergenerational trauma staff is seeing there. A grandmother may have been a refugee in 1948, with her children experiencing the same thing following the Six-Day War in 1967. Today, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are refugees. “This is what we see with mental health in Palestine,” Khader said. “We see intergenerational trauma that plays a huge role in people’s attitudes.”
Palestinian parents often have their version of “The Talk” with their children. “Our mothers had to teach us how to behave with soldiers,” he said. “We have to endure that moment throughout our upbringing.” He experienced it himself while driving his children to their first day of school last year. Two military gates had been put in place along the road that leads to the school. Soldiers trained their weapons on the car while they questioned Khader. “For a whole month, that was my anxiety, day after day, taking them to school and back,” he said. “In that moment, I understood it clearly. You never know that feeling until you go through it.”
Palestinians live in a largely patriarchal society “where men don’t talk about their issues,” he said. After the war started, the number of calls for service increased dramatically from anxious parents, who told Anar workers, “We don’t understand our emotions. We can’t regulate our temper. We really need support.”
Last year, almost 100 facilitators received training to lead circles for women, children and families. “The need is really huge. We work with people who are directly under the heat and pressure of violence” as well as children who have been arrested or have been beaten by soldiers when they went to school. “We have programs for keeping counselors’ well-being and hope up,” he said.
Inside the head of every Palestinian living in the West Bank, traumatized or not, is an acknowledgement they might be next. “That has created pressure on everyone, especially parents,” he said.
Unfortunately, many families are leaving. In Bethlehem’s Christian community, about 200 families have moved away. “Most of the ones who left are not economically disadvantaged,” he said. “They are fed up and they won’t take it anymore.”
“Justice is the most important part in our healing,” he said. “Without justice, there’s nothing close to healing. We can give people tools and resilience to keep going through the same issues.”
He told the story of a family living in a refugee camp in the northern portion of the West Bank. Soldiers rapped on their door and gave the family 10 minutes to leave their home. When the family left, they realized they’d left behind one of their daughters, who was sitting on the bed listening to music through headphones. The soldiers picked her up and eventually released her.
“We worked with her and she was completely traumatized,” Khader said. “Her mother was traumatized as well” because people kept asking her, “How come you forgot your daughter?” The two worked with others who’d been through something similar. “In trauma, guilt is a huge thing,” he said.
The Rev. Jihyun Oh, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the PC(USA) and Executive Director of the Unified Agency, asked Khader how trauma translates into violence. “If the mother and father experience trauma, usually [their children] will too,” he said. “We don’t blame children. We want to protect children from being harmed in the future and being exposed to violence and then doing violence themselves.”
In addition to the PC(USA), Anar’s funding partners include UNICEF and Save the Children, according to Khader. “It’s a blessing to have them trust you early on in your [organizational life],” he said. “People know we do really good work.”
Anar plans to intensify its work in the northern part of the West Bank and by June move some of its efforts to Gaza. “We feel we are now ready to accompany people and be with them to support families there,” he said.
Asked by Oh, “what churches like ours can do to be supportive,” Khader said it’s “a scar on my heart that [different churches] understand our Christ in a different context. I think we need to do more than pray. The church needs to be responsible to be with the oppressed and seek justice for them, and to speak truth to power, which is part of loving our enemies.”
“My everyday work is not work. It’s faith in action. It’s work in action,” he said. “I feel like I’m saying what Jesus is all about with people going through this oppression.”
“Let’s continue to push our churches to speak truth to power,” he said.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
