Only One in Ten Palestinian Women Has Ever Been Screened for Cervical Cancer, Survey Finds

Cervical cancer is one of the few malignancies that modern medicine can largely prevent, yet a new study from Palestine suggests that the tools of prevention are reaching only a small fraction of the women who could benefit from them. In a cross-sectional survey of 707 women aged 18 to 65, researchers found that just 9.5 percent — 67 participants — reported ever undergoing cervical cancer screening. The finding, published in Discover Social Science and Health, exposes a stark gap between what women in Palestine believe about cancer prevention and what they actually know or do about it, and it offers a detailed map of the social and educational factors that determine who gets screened and who is left behind.

The research team, led by Leen Ghanim of Al-Quds Bard College and Alhareth M. Amro of the Faculty of Medicine at Al-Quds University, with collaborators from Hebron University, An-Najah National University and Jordan University of Science and Technology, set out to measure three intertwined variables: knowledge of cervical cancer, attitudes toward its prevention, and self-reported screening history. Palestine is a particularly important setting for this kind of investigation because, unlike many high-income countries, it lacks an organized, population-based cervical cancer screening program. In the absence of systematic invitations, reminders and registry-based follow-up, screening depends almost entirely on women seeking it out on their own initiative or on a clinician recommending it during an unrelated visit — a model that the new data suggest is failing most of the population.

The study was conducted between November and December 2025 using an online, self-administered questionnaire adapted from a previously published knowledge, attitudes and practices instrument and modified to fit the Palestinian context. Participants answered items covering sociodemographic characteristics, cervical cancer knowledge, attitudes toward screening, and whether they had ever been screened. The scoring system was deliberately simple and transparent: each knowledge item earned one point for a correct answer and zero for an incorrect answer, a “don’t know” response or a refusal, producing a maximum knowledge score of 32. Attitude items were scored the same way, with medically appropriate responses earning one point each, for a maximum of 8. This dichotomous approach allowed the researchers to quantify both how much women knew and how favorably they viewed prevention, and then to test whether either measure predicted actual screening behavior.

The results revealed a sobering asymmetry. The mean knowledge score was 9.7 out of a possible 32, with a standard deviation of 7.2 — a figure that indicates substantial and widespread gaps in understanding of cervical cancer, its causes and its preventability. Yet the mean attitude score was 5.45 out of 8, with a standard deviation of 2.01, suggesting that most participants held generally favorable views toward cervical cancer prevention. In other words, Palestinian women in this sample were not resistant to the idea of screening; they were simply underinformed about it. The two scores were moderately correlated, meaning that women who knew more about the disease also tended to hold more favorable attitudes, but knowledge and attitudes clearly operated on different levels of the behavioral pathway.

That distinction became even more consequential when the researchers turned to multivariable logistic regression, a statistical technique that estimates the independent effect of each factor while holding all the others constant. In this analysis, four variables emerged as independently associated with self-reported previous screening: older age, marital status, higher educational level and a higher knowledge score. Notably, the attitude score was not independently associated with screening uptake once these other factors were accounted for. The implication is striking — good intentions and positive attitudes toward prevention do not translate into action unless they are anchored by concrete knowledge and by demographic circumstances that bring women into contact with the health system.

The role of age and marital status fits with what is known about how screening is delivered in settings without organized programs. Older women are more likely to have had routine gynecological encounters, pregnancies, or other healthcare interactions during which a provider might raise the topic of cervical screening, and married women similarly accumulate more contact points with reproductive health services. Education, meanwhile, shapes both health literacy and the confidence to navigate a fragmented healthcare landscape. But the strongest modifiable signal in the data is knowledge itself: women who scored higher on the 32-point knowledge scale were significantly more likely to report having been screened, which positions education as the most actionable lever available to Palestinian health authorities.

From a technical standpoint, the study’s design carries both strengths and limitations that readers should keep in mind. The cross-sectional, online format means the sample skews toward women with internet access and the inclination to complete a survey, so the true national picture could differ. Self-reported screening history is also vulnerable to recall bias and to confusion between cervical screening and other gynecological examinations, a problem that is amplified when general knowledge of what a Pap test or HPV test actually involves is low. The authors themselves frame the work as evidence-generating for health-promotion strategy rather than a definitive prevalence estimate, and the questionnaire’s adaptation from a validated instrument, along with ethics approval from Al-Quds University’s Research Ethics Committee and electronic informed consent from all participants, gives the findings a solid methodological footing within those constraints.

The public health stakes are considerable. Cervical cancer is driven overwhelmingly by persistent infection with high-risk types of human papillomavirus, and decades of evidence from countries with organized programs show that regular screening can catch precancerous lesions years before they become invasive, rendering the disease one of the most survivable cancers when detected early. The World Health Organization’s global strategy for cervical cancer elimination rests on three pillars — vaccination, screening and treatment of precancerous lesions — and countries without structured screening programs consistently report low uptake, late-stage diagnosis and preventable deaths. The Palestinian data add a granular, locally grounded data point to that global picture, quantifying exactly how wide the gap is between favorable attitudes and actual preventive behavior when no system exists to close it.

The authors’ conclusion points toward a practical remedy rooted in primary healthcare. Because higher knowledge was the key modifiable predictor of screening, they argue for health-promotion strategies embedded in primary care settings that improve cervical-cancer-specific knowledge, clarify the purpose of preventive screening — distinguishing it from examinations for symptoms — and encourage providers to recommend screening during routine healthcare encounters. Provider-led recommendation is a low-cost intervention with demonstrated effect in other low-resource settings, and it could compensate for the absence of organized invitation systems. Marital status and age, being non-modifiable, instead help identify which groups to target: outreach could prioritize younger and unmarried women who currently have the fewest natural touchpoints with screening services.

What makes this study resonate beyond Palestine is the clarity of its central lesson: attitudes are not the bottleneck. Women in the survey were broadly receptive to the idea of preventing cervical cancer, but without knowledge of why, when and how to be screened — and without a clinician or a system prompting them — that receptiveness remained dormant. For health systems across the region and in other settings without organized screening, the message is that information campaigns and provider training may deliver more screening uptake per dollar than campaigns aimed at changing opinions. As the global community pursues the WHO’s elimination targets, evidence like this underscores that the final mile of cancer prevention is often not a matter of technology or will, but of making sure every woman knows that a simple, life-saving test exists and is invited to take it.

Subject of Research: Cervical cancer screening knowledge, attitudes and uptake among women in Palestine

Article Title: Knowledge, attitudes, and factors associated with cervical cancer screening uptake among women in Palestine: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Ghanim, L., Musa, B., Massarwa, R., Mosleh, I., Manadre, S., Bari, A., Haj, N., Bozia, Y., Shqerat, H., Bakhtan, S., Alsheqerat, H., Deeb, S., & Amro, A. M. (2026). Knowledge, attitudes, and factors associated with cervical cancer screening uptake among women in Palestine: a cross-sectional study. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00458-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00458-8

Keywords: cervical cancer, cancer screening, Palestine, women's health, human papillomavirus, health knowledge, screening uptake, cross-sectional study, cancer prevention, primary healthcare, public health, health promotion