DayofPal—A new investigation by the Palestinian Feminist Collective finds that Israel is carrying out a reproductive genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, confirming a decades-long campaign aimed at dismantling Palestinian future generations.
The 188-page report argues that Israeli attacks go far beyond wartime conduct in Gaza, describing a structured pattern of “reproductive genocide” targeting Palestinian bodies, families, and healthcare systems.
According to the findings, Israeli forces have destroyed or severely damaged maternity wards, fertility clinics, and neonatal care units across Gaza Strip.
The broader blockade and military assault have made safe pregnancy and childbirth increasingly impossible with hospitals are reported to be operating without electricity, fuel, anesthesia, or essential medical supplies, forcing women to give birth in overcrowded shelters or amid rubble.
UN documented that Israeli forces’ cutoff of electricity at Al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital led to the deaths of four premature babies, whose decomposed bodies were later found still attached to life-support machines.
Doctors who served in Gaza described performing Caesarean sections and other surgeries without anesthesia because hospitals lacked essential medical supplies.
The report also highlights as widespread assault against civilians, including mothers and children, citing cases where entire families were killed during airstrikes even shortly after childbirth.
It further claims that thousands of Palestinian children have been killed since October 2023, while many others remain buried under rubble or have lost their mothers.
Rania Abu Anza underwent 10 years of IVF treatment before giving birth to twins, Naeim and Wissam. The twins, along with their father, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in March 2024.
The report also recounts the case of Jomana Arafa, who was killed alongside her newborn twins and her mother just two days after giving birth while sheltering in an area designated by Israel as a “safe humanitarian zone.”
Researchers involved in the study add that the systematic deprivation of clean water, nutrition, and reproductive healthcare has led to soaring miscarriage rates, severe maternal risks, and long-term threats to fertility across the population.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective contends that these conditions reflect an intentional strategy to undermine Palestinian continuity, pointing to historical rhetoric and policies framing Palestinian population growth as a demographic threat.
UN experts and international investigators cited in the report have also raised concerns over the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, and the broader impact of the war on children and reproductive health.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said: “It is an indictment of a system that has transformed Palestinian life—bodies, homes, families, reproductive existence, and even the dead—into instruments of control and domination.”
Albanese also stated: “The crimes against the Palestinians… are not a total sum of isolated abuses, but a system of domination, oppression and erasure.”
Framing the situation as part of a wider system of domination, the report concludes that Palestinian reproductive life has become a central battleground, where survival itself is increasingly under assault.
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