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Eyad El-Sarraj, who championed nonviolence, in 2011. Recently he had promoted reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas.
Eyad El-Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist who pioneered mental health care in Gaza and became an internationally recognized human rights advocate, criticizing both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities, died on Tuesday in a hospital in Israel. He was 70.
The cause was leukemia, his family said.
Rising to prominence during the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation, in Gaza in the late 1980s, Dr. Sarraj focused in particular on the traumatic effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on children.
He described those effects in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in 2009 during a three-week offensive by Israeli forces in Gaza after years of rocket fire from there against southern Israel.
"Many children in Gaza are wetting their beds, unable to sleep, clinging to their mothers," he wrote. "Worse are the long-term consequences of this severe trauma. Palestinian children in the first intifada 20 years ago threw stones at Israeli tanks trying to wrest freedom from Israeli military occupation. Some of those children grew up to become suicide bombers in the second intifada 10 years later."
He added, "It does not take much to imagine the serious changes that will befall today's children."
Politically independent, Dr. Sarraj championed nonviolence and democracy. In recent years he was involved in trying to promote reconciliation between Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, and its rival Fatah, the mainstream party led by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Those efforts have so far been unsuccessful.
Speaking at Dr. Sarraj's funeral in Gaza on Wednesday, Ismail Haniya, the prime minister of the Hamas government, described him as "a meeting point for all Palestinian people," adding, "He is going to be missed by Palestine and Gaza because he was born and lived for them."
Rami Hamdallah, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority government, said Dr. Sarraj's achievements would remain as "a beacon for the continuation of the march" of the Palestinian people toward an independent state.
Fluent in English, Dr. Sarraj gained international respect, and his Gaza City home was familiar to foreign diplomats, researchers and journalists seeking his opinions.
Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, described Dr. Sarraj in a statement as "someone who persistently stood on the side of human rights, peace and justice." He received several human rights awards abroad.
But Dr. Sarraj was not always in such favor with the local authorities. When the Palestinian Authority's security forces were dominant in the cities of the coastal territory of Gaza in the mid-1990s, he was detained twice, spending days in a police lockup. The first detention came after he accused the security forces of torturing members of Hamas who had been rounded up after a wave of suicide bombings in Israel. He was seized a second time after he wrote an article criticizing a Palestinian Authority official.
From 1996 to 1998, Dr. Sarraj was the commissioner general of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens Rights, a watchdog body formed by decree by the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. It was Mr. Arafat who ordered Dr. Sarraj's detention in one case, according to human rights activists in Gaza. (Israel unilaterally withdrew from the strip in 2005.)
Eyad Rajab El-Sarraj was born on April 27, 1943, in Beersheba, a city that was then under the British rule of the Mandate of Palestine and that is now in southern Israel. He moved with his family to Gaza to escape the war of 1948 over the establishment of Israel.
In the 1970s he studied medicine at the University of Alexandria in Egypt and then in Britain, graduating with a master's degree from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London.
While in Britain he married an English woman, and they had two sons, Ahmed-Saif and Waseem. They divorced, and Dr. Sarraj remarried in Gaza in 2004. His survivors include his wife, Nirmeen; their son Ali, 7; and his sons from his first marriage.
In 1990 Dr. Sarraj founded the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, an institution that describes its goals as developing the mental well-being of the Palestinian community and working to empower vulnerable groups like children, women and "victims of organized violence and torture."
For the past five years Dr. Sarraj had been treated for cancer, according to a stepdaughter, Noor Kharma.
Issam Younis, director of the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza, said Dr. Sarraj had displayed a "gentlemanly antagonism" in tackling major issues and national concerns. The failure to reconcile the Palestinian schism "left his heart aching because he was not used to failure," Mr. Younis said.
Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
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