As Palestinian women, we watch the news with the eyes and hearts of mothers, constantly fearing for our children and striving to protect them from missiles and bullets of the Occupation that aim at their innocent faces and small bodies. We constantly ask ourselves: Why must mothers in Gaza and Palestine endure such pain? What does it mean to be a mother in Occupied Palestine? Is giving birth in this land a crime against our children?
Motherhood in occupied Palestine can be defined as a “constant state of fear, grief, and anger.” It means perpetually preparing for loss and learning to control our emotions. It involves preparing our children for forced absences, sudden deaths, unexpected arrests, critical injuries, and more. The sources of pain are numerous, keeping us constantly on edge. Yet, reasons for hope are scarce. As Palestinian mothers, our role is to maintain a balance between pain and hope in our children’s hearts and minds, making life possible and bearable.
Artwork by Sliman Mansour
In this article, I aim to share the experiences of women in Gaza during the ongoing war — bring their voices to the forefront while ours take a step back. My goal is to shed light on the unseen and untold suffering they endure. I wish to narrate their stories, those that were overlooked by camera lenses and left untold by reporters on television. Amidst the overwhelming bloodshed and horrific death toll, there has been little space left for grief, mourning, and catharsis.
Policies of Denying Motherhood During the War on Gaza
Since Oct. 7, women in Gaza have been subjected to unbearable and unimaginable suffering, making them vulnerable to various forms of oppression by the Occupation forces. They have experienced the worst kinds of pain, oppression, and loss. Their senses have been numbed, their bodies violated, their memories shattered, and their motherhood denied. Gaza is experiencing a mass genocide that transcends time and reveals an impending death threatening all living beings in a scene devoid of any semblance of humanity.
Heba Abu Nada, a martyr from Gaza wrote on her Facebook page on Oct. 9, just days before her death on Oct. 23, describing this war compared to previous wars waged by the Israeli forces on Gaza in recent years: “In every previous war, Israel had a specific pattern of targets, sometimes it was families, sometimes mosques, sometimes streets, sometimes border or central areas, and sometimes residential towers. There was a plan for the bombardment that we, the ones under fire, understood, and based on that, we could predict the targets, the airstrikes, and the expected duration of the war. But this time, there is no specific pattern; everything is under attack, like all previous wars crushed into one. Gaza, from north to south, is under indiscriminate and relentless fire, a state of mass slaughter and arbitrary assassination of everything.”
In the same vein, a woman who is five months pregnant asks through a Facebook page dedicated to maternal and child care: “The situation here is dangerous, and the sounds of exploding missiles are terrifying. I franticaklly run around the house every hour, and I am forcefully startled from the sounds of missiles and jolt awake terrified at night. For two days now, I haven’t felt my baby kick at all. How do I know if my baby is still alive?”
This fear-filled question haunts thousands of women. Currently, there are more than 493,000 displaced women and girls in Gaza due to the war, and the number is on the rise. Among them are 900 widowed women who are now responsible for supporting their families after the death of their partners. There are also more than 2,187 martyred women (as of Oct. 31), 50,000 pregnant women waiting to give birth (including 5,522 expected to deliver in the next month), while there are 540,000 women of childbearing age in Gaza. Mothers in Gaza face immense risks; They live in a state of daily fear and trauma, with limited access to medical supplies. They may even face difficulties having access to anesthetics and pain relief or other essential medications during complicated childbirth and labor.
Palestinian women in Gaza also face an increased chance of miscarriage, stillbirth, or premature birth. As a result, maternal mortality rates during childbirth are likely to continue to rise. Additionally, women in Gaza suffer from a lack of sanitary pads and the necessary water for maintaining personal hygiene. They are forced to sleep on the floor in shelters, exposed to the elements and experiencing great physical discomfort. Some women have resorted to taking birth control pills to stop their menstrual cycle, which could cause future health risks.
This situation underscores the harsh reality that pregnancy, postpartum, childbirth, menstruation, and abortion do not cease during war.
Wombs under Siege
Researcher Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes how the Israeli Occupation uses women’s bodies and their wombs as tools of blackmail and intimidation. She states, “I have talked extensively about how to read women's sexuality in the context of Israeli settler violence, and one example in my writings is that during the war on Gaza, Mordechai Kedar, an academic who served for 25 years in the Israeli military intelligence, when asked about how to deal with Palestinian resistance, he said, ‘The only way is to frighten them and rape their women.' In the Battle of Jenin, Israeli soldiers announced over loudspeakers, 'People of Jenin, surrender yourselves and spare your women.’”
Similarly, researcher Nour Bader, in an interview on the same topic, highlights her work with Gazan women with terminal breast cancer while filming her documentary titled “The Edge of Death.” She sheds light on the intricate network of oppression that women face: “Women's wombs in Gaza have remained under siege for seventeen years, and these women have suffered greatly due to extremely harsh living conditions. ‘As long as the womb keeps working, it keeps giving birth.’ This popular phrase should make us recognize the cruelty of treating the womb as a mere machine or vessel tasked only with giving birth. If you look at the women themselves, you would know that these wombs were never mere vessels for children; they are the first cradles for our children. In this cradle, our feelings for our unborn children began to take shape through waiting and eagerness to see our children's faces and hear their voices — feelings that then develop into a strong bond as we hold our children close to our hearts after birth.”
Artwork by Sliman Mansour
In response to a question about the policies of denying motherhood during the war, particularly through the specter of repeated loss, Bader states, “Loss during the war makes us question the value of life as mothers. This is why denying Palestinian women mothering is key to the colonial project. With repeated loss, mothers cry out, 'Take us with them,' 'Bury us with them.' With the loss of their children, mothers lose the meaning of their life. What else does it mean to kill everyone that women love and live for? Her children are killed yet she is asked to give birth again and again, to grieve repeatedly. As a mother, I can say that pregnancy could become a source of fear instead of joy. In normal circumstances, pregnancy is a source of happiness and delight. However, in the context of war, pregnancy can become a source of fear and confusion as you fear the death of your unborn children even before their actual birth.”
Similarly, Dr. Ibrahim Matar, a witness to the worst atrocities of this war, describes one of the most painful scenes he witnessed: “I saw mothers running in the corridors, crying as if the world had ended. They gasped with wild questions and screamed, 'Are they alive? Who is still alive? Where are my children? I have no one but them, oh God.'”
The martyr Heba Abu Nada described mothers’ primary role in Gaza which is to worry: “Mothers don't understand ordinary phone calls intended to reassure or ask about the time when they are returning home. In their mind, there is always a disaster behind every question or something horrible that we are hiding from thrm. Oh God, will mothers ever stop worrying?” An important question raised by the martyr, and one she inadvertently answers in another post where she wrote: “In paradise, there is a new Gaza without a siege getting built now,” implying that worry cannot leave the hearts of mothers in Gaza except in a parallel universe without the Israeli Occupation.
Postcolonial feminist theories highlight the strong relationship between mother and nation and indicate that the biological role of women is often assigned a central and important place in national discourse and national struggle. Women's bodies are systematically targeted as part of colonial power mechanisms to impose racial dominance and eliminate indigenous communities. Sexual violence has been committed in colonial contexts against indigenous women through rape, control of their reproductive capacities, torture, and killing.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian points out that the imbalance between external Israeli power and internal Palestinian power leads to the redirection of this Israeli power toward groups with limited power, usually women. Her analysis suggests that violence against Palestinian women's bodies and their sexuality is reinforced by the Zionist state to bolster patriarchal structures. The Israeli state has exploited the threat of sexual violence against Palestinian women and patriarchal conceptions of sexuality and “honor” to recruit Palestinians as collaborators and deter organized resistance.
Zionist and colonial propaganda portrays Palestinians as a people lacking the “vitamin” of motherhood while presenting Israeli society as the pinnacle of humanity and emotion. They attempt to brand Palestinian society as backward, discriminatory against women, and hateful. However, reality shows that mothers are the cornerstone of Palestinian society, and their role cannot be confined to biological motherhood alone. Mothering becomes a revolutionary force; Raising children in Occupied Palestine is part of our collective resistance especially since mothering necessitates raising children as a life force in a world that can only be changed together.
The Palestinian martyr, Jamila Al-Shanti, known as Um Abdullah, is a significant example of the revolutionary role of mothers in Gaza. Al-Shanti, who was killed on Oct. 18 after her house was bombed by Israeli warplanes in Gaza City, was the first woman to join the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and gained prominence in 2006 when she led a women's march that successfully broke the Israeli army's siege of a mosque in Beit Hanoun, where dozens of resistance fighters were besieged. Three days after that event, her house was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, leading to the martyrdom of her brother's wife. In 2013, she was appointed as Minister of Women's Affairs, and in 2021, she became a member of Hamas’ political bureau.
Thousands of mothers in Gaza have been martyred, while thousands are widowed, and thousands more are losing their children. There are also thousands of children who are now left motherless and thousands of fetuses killed inside their mothers' wombs before even seeing the light of day. The massacre continues, and the continuous and heartbreaking tragedy of loss has yet to stop. All of this is happening, and there is no way for the women of Gaza to voice their pain except through screams, tears, and prolonged laments that have touched the hearts of millions of mothers behind the screens worldwide. Mothering is a collective instinctual act, its force knows no bounds, and no prose can adequately describe it. Behind all the exhausted Palestinian mothers, there is the mother who shouldered all our burdens and endured all our pains, in a journey that dates back more than two thousand years. She is the keeper of our memories, and for her sake, our blood has been spilled. She is our great mother, and our land, Palestine, from the river to the sea.
