-
Sexual and Reproductive Violence in Palestine: Women as a Strategic Target of Genocide
-
Asamblea Nacional por el Agua, la Vida y el Territorio denuncia ataque del narco al colectivo Un Salto de Vida
-
Noticias de Abajo – 26 feb 2026
-
Fracking es apuesta de Sheibaum para lograr soberanía energética; investigadores refutan decisión
-
1000+ medical professionals will sail to Gaza: Global Sumud Flotilla
-
JORNADAS ZAPATISTAS «Justicia para Samir y autodeterminación para los pueblos». 22 DE FEBRERO DE 2026, Caracoles de Nuevo Jerusalén, Patria Nueva, Tulan Kau y Jolja
-
El CNI denuncia complicidad entre el poder judicial y el grupo paramilitar ORCAO y advierte riesgos a la salud de las familias desplazadas
-
Desde Slumil K´ajxemk´op, con Samir en el corazón.
-
JORNADAS ZAPATISTAS «Justicia para Samir y autodeterminación para los pueblos». 21 DE FEBRERO DE 2026, Caracoles de Roberto Barrios, La Unión, Jacinto Canek y Dolores Hidalgo
-
JORNADAS ZAPATISTAS «Justicia para Samir y autodeterminación para los pueblos». 20 DE FEBRERO DE 2026, Caracoles de La Realidad, Oventik, Garrucha y Morelia
Sexual and Reproductive Violence in Palestine: Women as a Strategic Target of Genocide
By Carolina Bracco* – LatFem
Far from being “collateral damage,” sexual and reproductive violence against Palestinian women is part of a long-standing colonial strategy. The genocide in Gaza is part of a demographic logic that seeks to prevent the reproduction of Palestinian life and annihilate not only the present, but also the possibility of a future.
The genocide in Gaza must be understood as the most recent phase of a colonial settlement project that, from its inception, aimed to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian population in order to guarantee Jewish supremacy over the territory. Far from being an exceptional episode, the current violence is part of a continuous Nakba, which began in 1948 and has never been interrupted.
That year, under the auspices of the British Mandate, Zionist militias carried out a systematic ethnic cleansing that forced more than 750,000 people to abandon their homes. More than 80% of the native population was expelled from the territory that would soon be declared the State of Israel. This foundational violence—accompanied by more than 13,000 murders—produced in a few months a radical transformation of the demographic composition: the Jewish population went from representing approximately 30% to 81% of the total. The objective was to replace the existing population, laying the foundations for a colonial order whose eliminationist logic continues to operate to this day.
But unlike other settlement processes, the colonial project did not end: it became normalized. Israel was recognized by the international community without any demands for justice, reparations, or the return of the displaced population.
Despite the mass expulsions of 1948 and 1967—which affected 250,000 people—the immigration of more than one million Jews from the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 2000, and the multiple massacres, the proportion of Palestinian population in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea never stopped increasing.
In 2000, Jewish settlers and their descendants made up 52% of the total population. By 2010, they represented only 49%. Ten years later, they accounted for just 47%. These figures come from Palestinian academic Joseph Masad , who sees the current genocide as a clear political strategy; the only one that would allow the settlers to maintain their supremacy over the historic Palestinian territory.
Concern about the demographic imbalance has always been present in Israeli rhetoric and policy. As early as the 1970s, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir—the same one who said that Palestinians “did not exist”—stated that she went to sleep worrying about how many Arab children would be born during the night. Four decades later, Justice Minister Ayelen Shaked openly declared that pregnant Palestinian women should be shot because “they give birth to little snakes.”
As reproducers of life and national continuity, Palestinian women have historically been constructed by the colonial regime as demographic threats. Within this framework, sexual, obstetric, physical, and symbolic violence perpetrated against them has been a persistent and structural practice. Its aim is to disrupt the reproduction of Palestinian life and break its continuity over time.
Genocide must be understood precisely in these terms: as the systematic destruction of a people, which is not limited to direct physical elimination, but also operates through blockade, prolonged siege, induced famine, the production of collective trauma, and the annihilation of present and future prospects. In this process, women’s bodies become a central battleground, where reproductive violence functions as a technology aimed at preventing the very survival of the Palestinian people.
“Reprocidio”: to annihilate the present and the future
At the heart of genocide is the elimination of life. And that is why resistance to this attempt at erasure depends not only on immediate survival, but also on the capacity to reproduce life: to conceive, to give birth, to raise children. Today, in Gaza, that is practically impossible. Reproductive violence manifests itself at every level: there are no homes, no privacy, no specialist doctors, no fertility treatments. Rape leaves traumatic scars on bodies that directly affect the ability to conceive. Between 2022 and 2025, miscarriages increased by 300% and the birth rate fell by 41%. And even if a woman manages to conceive, under what conditions will she give birth? Without hospitals, without neonatal care, without anesthesia for cesarean sections. And if she gives birth and the baby survives, cold and famine await: malnourished mothers, without access to breast milk, without formula, without clean water, without basic immunity.
This set of practices is defined by the Gazan academic Hala Shoman as reprocidio : a specific form of colonial violence that aims to dismantle the reproductive structures of a population in order to eliminate it not only in the present, but also in its future potential.
The paradigmatic case was the bombing of the Al Basma fertility center , the largest in Gaza, in December 2023. A missile destroyed more than 4,000 embryos and over 1,000 samples of unfertilized sperm and eggs. Dr. Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, the center’s founder, described the magnitude of the attack with a heartbreaking phrase: “5,000 lives in a single projectile.” This deliberate attack is part of a systematic and sustained policy of reproductive annihilation, which ranges from the destruction of maternal and child health hospitals to the obstruction of safe childbirth, the use of sexual violence in prisons, environmental poisoning, the destruction of homes, and the structural impossibility of raising or breastfeeding children in conditions of minimal dignity.
This is compounded by the total collapse of the healthcare system, the lack of electricity in incubators, the surge in births without anesthesia or supplies, and the exponential increase in emergency cesarean sections and hysterectomies performed to prevent fatal hemorrhaging. In some cases, doctors have had to perform post-mortem cesarean sections to save babies from the wombs of their murdered mothers.
The conditions of childbirth and raising children in makeshift shelters—many surrounded by Israeli tanks or lacking access to water, food, or privacy—have created an environment of structural trauma and hopelessness. Many women express a desire to carry their children back inside their bodies as the only way to protect them.
Meanwhile, attacks against reproduction are not limited to Gaza. In Israeli prisons, accounts of sexual violence and torture with direct impacts on reproductive health are multiplying. These assaults not only seek to harm individual bodies: they aim to humiliate, break, instill terror, and dismantle the intimate fabric of Palestinian life, erasing the possibilities of motherhood, fatherhood, or shared intimacy.
Sexual violence as a colonial technology
Sexual violence is not a recent or marginal phenomenon; it has been central to colonial practices from the very beginning. It has been a systematic policy of both labor and right-wing governments. In the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, mass rapes of Palestinian women and girls were reported. According to historian Ilan Pappé, Zionist leaders proudly announced the high number of victims to sow panic. Under those circumstances, fleeing was the only rational option. Since then, thousands of girls and women, as well as men and boys, have been victims of rape, genital torture, forced feminization, and castration as part of a systematic colonial technology of domination.
The Sde Teiman detention center , where more than 4,000 Gazans have been held since October 7, has become a torture center even more brutal than Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Allegations of rape and sexual abuse are numerous. Instead of prosecuting the perpetrators, sectors of Israeli society have been seen demonstrating in defense of the accused soldiers .
Gender and sexuality dynamics are fundamental to understanding the structure of Israeli colonialism. Domination operates through the feminization of the enemy: raping a Palestinian woman is to humiliate her community; feminizing the colonized man is to symbolically castrate him; dismembering a body is to turn it into waste.
White, colonial, and Zionist masculinity is imposed not only by force, but also by discourse. In mainstream media and liberal circles in the West, Palestinians are portrayed as barbarians, violent, misogynistic, fanatical, or simply as faceless numbers.
This discursive operation constitutes what Orlando Patterson defined as “social death”: the symbolic dispossession of agency, history, and belonging to the human race. Within this framework, the rape of Palestinian bodies is a tool. And its impunity, a symptom of structural dehumanization.
In practice, this translates into a comprehensive genocidal policy where the deliberate destruction of schools, hospitals, universities, libraries, churches, mosques, and water and energy networks is a systematic strategy to prevent Palestinian social reproduction. What is sought to be destroyed is not only the present, but also the possibility of a collective future. It is a violence that affects bodies, but also knowledge, affections, memory, and ways of life.
Sustaining life under conditions of death
In this context of absolute violence, affirming life becomes an act of insurrection. However, not all families can or wish to reproduce. Many women have publicly expressed their decision to avoid pregnancy during the genocide, given the collapse of the healthcare system and the extreme risk of maternal or infant death. As Hala Shoman wrote on social media in August 2024: “Think carefully before bringing children into the world. Miscarriage rates have tripled. Mothers are bleeding to death. There is no milk, no food, no medicine. This is a plea wrapped in love and fear.” These words encapsulate the ethical and political dilemma faced by those who wish to continue an emotional and family life amidst a regime of extermination.
At the same time, this temporary refusal to reproduce does not contradict the affirmative impulse toward life, but rather forms part of an ethic of care and a politics of protection against extermination. As Shoman points out, resistance does not simply mean having children; it means making the conditions for life possible. And that, in Gaza today, is a radical form of struggle.
Sustaining life under conditions of death means challenging the legal framework that defines genocide solely in terms of death tolls. Destroying the capacity to reproduce, imposing perpetual mourning, closing off possibilities, preventing children from being raised, criminalizing childhood, and isolating desire are forms of annihilation that international law still fails to fully recognize.
The history of Palestinian women is the history of Palestine. It is a story of resilience and resistance, of occupation and exile, but also of continuity and the struggle for the very possibility of existing, of continuing, of living with dignity. It is a struggle not only for liberation, but also against elimination.
Palestinian women, in this context, are not only victims. They are active agents of resistance. Their bodies bear the marks of the extermination project, but also the stubborn will to live. And as long as there is life to be defended, to be reproduced, to be told, there will be a future for Palestine.
*Carolina Bracco, political scientist, PhD in Arab and Hebrew cultures, writer and researcher.
Read also: https://www.elsaltodiario.com/palestina/israel-empleo-municion-carbonizo-3-000-gazaties-dejar-rastro
Asamblea Nacional por el Agua, la Vida y el Territorio denuncia ataque del narco al colectivo Un Salto de Vida
JALISCO ES MÉXICO
El Río Santiago de El Salto y Juanacatlán, Jalisco se encuentra gravemente enfermo por desechos industriales sumándose a megaproyectos termoeléctricos que intensifican el sacrificio de nuestros territorios.
“El sistema criminal capitalista aplasta y barre todo lo que considera no necesario, lo que consideran que es el lastre, y el lastre son millones de seres humanos a través de la guerra y el genocidio” #EZLN
“El genocidio capitalista del narcotráfico, narco gobierno o narco capitalismo salvaje, genera 800 mil millones de dólares anuales, los bancos son los que se quedan con la mayor parte del blanqueo del capital $$$ … la estrategia no es combatir el narcotráfico, pero si utilizarlo como un instrumento de dominación militar, imponer el miedo que paralice para sostener un sistema en crisis” (Libro de Gilberto López y Rivas)
30 AÑOS DEL NACIMIENTO DEL CONGRESO NACIONAL INDÍGENA, 6 ASAMBLEAS NACIONALES POR EL AGUA, LA VIDA Y EL TERRITORIO.
SEGUIMOS EXISTIENDO PORQUE AÚN RESISTIMOS.
AL EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL
AL CONGRESO NACIONAL INDÍGENA-CONCEJO INDÍGENA DE GOBIERNO
A LA SEXTA NACIONAL E INTERNACIONAL
A LAS REDES DE RESISTENCIA Y REBELDÍA
A LA EUROPA INSUMISA
A LOS ORGANISMOS DE DERECHOS HUMANOS NACIONALES E INTERNACIONALES
A LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN LIBRES E INDEPENDIENTES.
Como Asamblea Nacional por el Agua, la Vida y el Territorio abrazamos a nuestras hermanas y hermanos del colectivo Un Salto de Vida, quienes viven todos los días la embestida capitalista, no es suficiente con la constante contaminación de su territorio y cuerpos por parte de la industria y el mal gobierno, tienen que enfrentar la cruenta violencia criminal que les arrebata sus herramientas de trabajo para defender la vida y les arrebata la tranquilidad.
Hoy hacemos nuestros sus dolores, su digna rabia y con énfasis hacemos nuestras sus exigencias.
A continuación, como asamblea abrimos espacio a su voz, para que, haciendo eco de ella, resuene en todos los rincones hasta construir la justicia verdadera:
HECHOS
Agradecemos la solidaridad para nombrar lo que ocurre en nuestros territorios, porque hablar de esto no es fácil, pero es urgente.
El Domingo 22 de febrero de 2026 derivado de las acciones capitalistas de #Narcobloqueos, nos encontrábamos en acciones de observación de territorio y monitoreo de descargas industriales junto con investigadores universitarios.
Fuimos retenidos cerca de la carretera a La Capilla, en el límite con Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos. Se nos obligó a descender de nuestra camioneta, la cual fue incendiada junto con todos nuestros teléfonos celulares y todos los equipos para el muestreo para registrar los contaminantes que son vertidos impunemente por las empresas del corredor industrial de #ElSalto. Fue una pérdida total. Afortunadamente, no pasó a mayores en relación a la integridad física, pero sí en un impacto psicosocial.
Los equipos y el vehículo quemado siempre están a disposición para la investigación, la defensa del territorio y acciones relacionadas con el vivero, reforestaciones y crianza del “Bosque del Fin del Mundo”. No es la primera vez que ocurre. Es algo al que estamos expuestos los defensores y defensoras del territorio, pero también todos aquellos que habitamos este planeta en este tiempo en donde el crimen organizado es sirviente siempre de intereses financieros y políticos de las élites que ven a la sociedad como desecho tóxico.
(Continuar leyendo…)
