Situating Palestinian mental health within liberation psychology, decolonial thought, transformative justice, community psychology and human rights frameworks enables a more comprehensive understanding of distress, resilience, and agency under occupation and settler colonialism. These frameworks highlight how communities engage in resistance, resilience and struggles for justice and dignity, reframing psychological well-being as inseparable from collective freedom and self-determination. They also provide conceptual tools to critique the ways in which Western NGOs and international aid often impose trauma models that individualize, psychologize and depoliticize suffering, while undermining grassroots organizations, inadvertently reproducing colonial power hierarchies (Helbich & Jabr, Citation2022; Makkawi, Citation2017).