One year on, Israel continues to target the strongest weapon of Palestine: the female womb
Palestinian women mourn a family member killed in Israeli bombardment, al-Maamadani Hospital in Gaza City, 17 July 2024
Zainab Mehdi writes in The New Arab on 7 October 2024:
For one year, the world has witnessed Israel’s relentless bombing of schools and hospitals, a second Nakba, and the destruction of livelihoods, all supposedly in the name of fighting Hamas. While all of this has been taking place, Palestinians have also been subjected to dehumanisation, including control through the use of AI at checkpoints. This brutality has been highly evident against women, with nearly half of the 41,000 Palestinians killed, being women and children.
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On 30 September 2024, Oxfam International announced that “more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military than in any other recent conflict in a single year.” These numbers are unfathomable, as are the other statistics we have seen since 7 October, including:
- 6,000 women and 11,000 children killed in Gaza by the IDF over the past year
- 5,000 embryos destroyed at the Al Basma Fertility Clinic
- A 300% increase in the miscarriage rate in Gaza since 7 October
- Only 2 of the 12 partially functioning hospitals in Gaza are able to provide maternity services, down from 36 hospitals before 7 October
- As of December 2023, over 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women were at high risk of malnutrition — a number likely to have spiked since then
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To maintain demographic superiority, the IDF has subjected Palestinian women to violence aimed at undermining their cultural and biological reproduction.
Methods include denying access to reproductive health services, destroying medical facilities, and committing acts of violence against women, such as humiliation, physical abuse, and rape. For years, and especially since the onset of the genocide in Gaza, the actions of the IDF have had devastating consequences for women’s health and childbirth experiences.
Many women in Gaza have faced traumatic deliveries without anaesthesia, and ongoing power outages in hospitals mean that doctors often rely on phone flashlights to perform surgeries. Moreover, the ongoing bombardment has heightened the risks of miscarriages and premature births, exacerbated by the extreme stress and fear that pregnant women face.