The war on the womb: Gaza’s reproductive genocide

In the landscape of modern warfare, the traditional image of the front line is a trench or a barricaded street. In Gaza, however, the front line has been moved into the delivery room and the neonatal ward.

Over the last two years, the Israeli military has executed a systematic campaign against the biological capacity of the Palestinian people. This is not a byproduct of urban combat or the unfortunate result of “collateral damage.” It is a calculated, gendered strategy of erasure.

By targeting maternal health infrastructure, destroying cryopreserved embryos, and inducing a state of permanent physical trauma in pregnant women, Israel is practicing what scholars now define as reproductive genocide.

The infrastructure of death in Gaza

The most chilling evidence of this campaign lies in the rubble of the Al-Basma IVF Centre in Gaza City. In December 2023, an Israeli shell struck the facility, shattering five liquid nitrogen tanks. Inside those tanks were 4,000 embryos, alongside 1,000 specimens of sperm and unfertilised eggs. For the thousands of Palestinians, these were not just biological samples; they were the last remaining hope for a future generation in a land where the present is being systematically destroyed.

The destruction of Al-Basma was not an isolated incident. By early 2025, nine out of ten fertility clinics in the Gaza Strip had been levelled. There is no military logic that justifies the shelling of a cryogenic lab located deep within a residential block, far from any alleged command centres. As the UN Commission of Inquiry noted in its 2025 report, these attacks were carried out with full knowledge of the facilities’ functions. This is the mechanics of the genocidal campaign: the cold, calculated destruction of the seeds of future life.

Beyond the labs, the physical infrastructure of birth has been dismantled. At the height of the bombardment, Israeli forces targeted the maternity wards of Al-Shifa and Al-Nasser hospitals. Oxygen supplies to incubators were cut, leading to the decomposed remains of premature babies being discovered weeks later in abandoned NICUs.

When the infrastructure of care is replaced by the infrastructure of death, the act of giving birth becomes a death sentence.

Demography as doctrine — The colonial fear of birth

To understand why Israel is doing this, one must look at the demographic anxieties that have defined Zionist colonial logic since 1948. In the eyes of a settler-colonial state, the Palestinian womb is viewed as a demographic threat. If the goal is the total control of land, then the biological reproduction of the indigenous population must be curtailed.

Scholars such as Nahla Abdo and Suad Joseph have long situated women at the centre of colonial and nationalist struggles, not merely as victims but as critical bearers of social and political continuity.

Abdo’s work on Palestinian resistance reveals how colonial violence penetrates the intimate sphere; regulating, disciplining, and punishing women’s bodies as part of a broader strategy of control. Similarly, Joseph’s analysis of gender and citizenship in the Middle East demonstrates how women’s roles within kinship and family structures are foundational to the reproduction of the nation itself.

Together, their scholarship reveals a central dynamic. In settler-colonial contexts, violence against women is not incidental but strategic, aimed at disrupting the social and biological conditions that sustain communities across generations. In this way, women’s bodies become key sites through which power seeks to fracture continuity and undermine collective survival.

By ensuring that 50,000 pregnant women at any given time are denied anesthesia, clean water, and basic nutrition, the state is not just killing individuals; it is attempting to break the biological chain of the Palestinian people.

A global history of sterilisation as strategy

This pattern is nothing new. Settler-colonial powers have long turned to forced sterilisation as a quiet, surgical strike against the wombs of the colonised.

In the United States, the Indian Health Service sterilised anywhere from a quarter to half of Native American women of childbearing age in the 1970s, often without real consent or even basic explanation; official records alone logged over 3,400 procedures in just four regions between 1973 and 1976, many on girls still in their teens.

Canada ran a parallel campaign for decades, coercing thousands of Indigenous women under eugenics laws and in remote “Indian hospitals,” deliberately severing the reproductive line to shrink land claims and ease assimilation. In Puerto Rico, under direct US rule, one in three women of childbearing age had been sterilised by the 1960s; the highest rate anywhere on earth, pushed through clinics and factories as the only “free” option for poor families.

And in Peru during the 1990s, Alberto Fujimori’s government sterilised roughly 300,000 mostly Indigenous women in rural highlands, using quotas, lies, and outright force to meet population-control targets dressed up as anti-poverty policy.

These were never random medical errors. They were demographic warfare by other means — slow, state-sponsored erasure aimed squarely at women because they carry the next generation. The same logic now stares back from Gaza’s ruined fertility clinics and the bodies of pregnant women left without care: cut the births, and you cut the people.

The intent is visible in the medical outcomes. Surgeons in Gaza have reported being forced to perform hysterectomies on young women who suffered from preventable postpartum haemorrhages because the specific medications to stop bleeding were blocked at the border. By attacking the pregnant body, the Israeli military attempts to sever the biological continuity of a people who refuse to be erased.

A woman in her third trimester cannot run from a “safe zone” to another when the evacuation orders come via a cryptic text message. She cannot survive on one piece of bread a day without her body beginning to consume itself, leading to the 300 per cent spike in miscarriages reported by local health officials.

By subjecting these women to reproductive torture, giving birth via C-section without painkillers or being discharged into a tent two hours after delivery, the Israeli military is sending a message: there is no safety for the next generation. The psychological trauma of being unable to protect or nourish a newborn is a weapon designed to break the spirit of the Palestinian community for decades to come.

Genocide in law — Preventing births as policy

Article II(d) of the 1948 Genocide Convention explicitly defines “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” as an act of genocide. Israel’s actions in Gaza fit this definition with terrifying precision. The 41pc drop in the birth rate recorded by mid-2025 is not a natural dip; it is the result of a manufactured environment of death.

When you deprive a population of the calories needed to breastfeed, when you destroy the labs that hold their future children, and when you bomb the hospitals where they go to labour, you are practicing genocide in its most intimate form. This is why it matters: it shifts the definition of the conflict from a territorial dispute to a biological war.

In 2024, the UN’s OHCHR reported Palestinian women and girls being intentionally targeted and extrajudicially executed in Gaza, often while seeking safety or waving a white cloth. Local witnesses and medical staff have corroborated accounts of snipers targeting the abdomens of heavily pregnant women outside hospitals like Al-Awda and Al-Nasser, turning the physical manifestation of future life into a deliberate target.

This violence is fuelled by a political discourse that characterises Palestinian children as “unlawful combatants.” High-ranking Israeli officials have stripped away the veneer of “collateral damage” with genocidal rhetoric. Most notoriously, Bezalel Smotrich has framed Palestinians as an “existential threat,” while advocating policies that envision their displacement and demographic reduction. These are not rogue outbursts; they echo former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s infamous promotion of a text calling the mothers of “snakes” (Palestinian children and youth) legitimate targets.

Archival genocide: Deleting life beyond death

Furthermore, the erasure of futurity extends to the systematic disruption of health information infrastructure: the main data centre that hosted the Gaza Ministry of Health’s national health database was destroyed during attacks on Al‑Shifa Hospital, severely disrupting digital health records and public health data systems. By bombing the data centers, the occupation is not just killing babies; it is deleting their legal existence and historical record.

This archival genocide works in tandem with the physical destruction of the IVF centers and NICUs. When a mother is shot by a sniper, her medical records are vaporised in a strike, and her surviving child is denied a birth certificate, the occupation achieves its ultimate goal: the total biological and administrative liquidation of the Palestinian presence.

Despite the scale of this, the horror remains largely underreported in Western media. This silence is rooted in the hierarchy of victimhood that dominates mainstream journalism. Western feminist movements, which are usually quick to advocate for reproductive rights, have been largely silent on Gaza. This is due to the successful dehumanisation of Palestinian women, who are often portrayed either as passive victims or as “factories” for future militants, rather than as human beings with a right to bodily autonomy and maternal joy.

Furthermore, reporting on reproductive genocide requires a level of nuance that the 24-hour news cycle avoids. It requires connecting the dots between a destroyed IVF lab and a colonial demographic policy. It is easier to report on a missile strike than it is to investigate the slow, agonising death of a neonatal system or the long-term impact of forced hysterectomies.

The destruction of Gaza’s reproductive health system is a crime that will be felt for a century. Even if the bombing stops tomorrow, the loss of 4,000 embryos and the permanent scarring of thousands of mothers means that a significant portion of a generation has already been erased.

It is not a humanitarian crisis; it is a reproductive genocide. It is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the “Palestinian problem” is solved not just through the seizure of land, but through the biological termination of a people. From Palestine to Lebanon, and across Syria and Iran, wars waged by settler-colonial powers underpinned by white supremacy consistently turn the womb into a battlefield, where future generations are preemptively erased, and hope itself becomes a casualty of strategic violence.