In my paper I confront the present humanitarian impasse facing Palestinian rights advocacy in the Occupied Territories - resting between the politics of trauma testimony and the growing critical practice of forensic architecture - through renewed readings of literature based on or set around the conflict, focusing specifically on the novella Returning to Haifa by celebrated Palestinian author, journalist, literary critic and polemicist Ghassan Kanafani. I argue that both humanitarian psychiatry (which focuses on victim testimony, but also imposes the trauma subject onto these victims) and forensic architecture (which abandons testimony in favor of examining built environments in the aftermath of violence in order to detect empirical evidence of rights violations) are inherently problematic by virtue of their elimination of the Palestinian entirely: the first, by denying individual political agency, and the second, by removing the physical body completely. My approach to Kanafani's text constitutes a comparative engagement with trauma studies, spatial theory, and para-literary and history texts in order to emphasize the physicality of traumatic neuroses present in the language of the novella. Reading the representation of the symptomatic aftermath of trauma in tandem with its spatial contingencies may begin to open a space for working through trauma that answers to both sides of this impasse. By performing this kind of analysis we can begin thinking about the site of the body and its relationship to spaces as essential to discussing processes of trauma, whether acting out or working through, that are relevant to both sides of this impasse.