Statement from the International Collective of the
Palestine Mental Health Networks
We, the international collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks, including Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, write from a place of rage and grief. For nearly two years, Sudan has endured systematic violence while the international community has chosen deliberate abandonment. Over twenty-one million people face famine. October marked the deadliest month for civilians since the war began. More than half of the internally displaced are children.
This is not neglect. It is active, calculated choice.
The Immediate Devastation
Sudan is experiencing mass atrocities designed to terrorize entire populations into submission and helplessness: systematic sexual violence as a weapon of war, siege warfare deliberately starving civilians, attacks on hospitals and humanitarian corridors, and mass displacement rendering communities unable to rebuild or resist. This violence serves to fracture Sudan’s social fabric, render the population dependent and powerless, and clear the way for resource extraction and geopolitical control.
Half of those displaced are children. They are experiencing starvation that causes irreversible brain damage, watching caregivers rendered powerless to provide safety, witnessing sexual violence against their mothers and sisters, and being severed from attachment bonds through repeated displacement. Without urgent intervention, these traumas will shape Sudan’s future for generations.
The Pattern of Abandonment
The international community mobilizes billions within months when it chooses to—yet Sudan’s UN humanitarian appeal remains barely funded. This reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of international response: protection and resources flow according to racialized hierarchies, not human need.
We see identical patterns in Palestine, where citizens face the same legacy of colonial exploitation of land and resources and its ongoing enactment in the present. Children face the same calculated starvation, the same use of siege as a weapon, the same international abandonment, while violence is framed as inevitable rather than chosen. In both contexts, colonial logic determines whose starvation demands immediate action and whose can be managed with “concern” while they die.
Whether in Sudan, Palestine, Congo, or Haiti, the same mechanisms operate: selective enforcement of international law, systematic underfunding of humanitarian appeals for Black and Brown populations, arms sales that profit from prolonged conflict, and the rendering of entire populations as disposable in service of extraction and control.
Our Demands
We call on the international community to:
Immediately upscale funding for Sudan’s humanitarian response to meet the level of the catastrophe.
Enforce arms embargoes and hold accountable all parties fueling the conflict.
Prioritize protection of civilians, including safe humanitarian corridors and an end to siege warfare.
Apply the same urgency and resources to Sudan as granted to other conflicts.
Recognize that systematic underfunding and abandonment of Sudan constitutes complicity in mass atrocity
We call on mental health professional organizations to:
Break the silence on Sudan and on all contexts of racialized
abandonment.
Use platforms and resources to demand accountability.
Recognize that neutrality in the face of genocide is an abandonment of professional ethics.
Stand in material solidarity with Sudanese mental health professionals facing displacement and violence
Our Commitment
As the International Collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks, including the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, our solidarity with Sudan is inseparable from our commitment to Palestinian liberation. We refuse the logic that renders any population expendable. We stand alongside all in resisting racialized abandonment and recognize that our struggles against the same system mean our liberation is interdependent.
To Sudanese people: your resistance is not alone. Your struggle will not be crushed by international abandonment. We see you, we stand with you, and we refuse silence.