Photo: Doaa Albaz

Palestinian mothers in the Gaza Strip are enduring severe and foreseeable harm as a direct result of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, which has systematically targeted and dismantled the conditions necessary for safe pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery. Experiences that should be protected and treated with dignity and care have instead been transformed into a source of acute danger, vulnerability, trauma, and loss, with devastating consequences for mothers and newborns alike.

Israel’s widespread attacks on hospitals and clinics providing reproductive and maternal healthcare, combined with prolonged restrictions on critical humanitarian assistance including food, medical supplies, shelter, electricity, and humanitarian assistance, have rendered pregnancy and childbirth life-threatening experiences. These conditions have led to preventable maternal injuries and deaths, as well as increased rates of miscarriage, obstructed labour, and premature birth. Expectant mothers are forced to give birth in overcrowded, unsterile, and under-resourced settings, often without access to anaesthesia, blood transfusions, antibiotics, or emergency obstetric care. Many women have undergone caesarean sections without adequate pain relief or post-operative care, while others have been denied medically necessary interventions altogether.

Postpartum mothers face ongoing violence through enforced hunger, repeated forced displacement, and the absence of medical follow-up, clean water, sanitation, and adequate shelter. Severe malnutrition and dehydration undermine recovery, increase the risk of infection and haemorrhage, and compromise lactation, while the psychological toll of constant bombardment, displacement, and bereavement inflicts serious and lasting mental harm.

The destruction of neonatal intensive care units and the denial of essential equipment, fuel, and electricity have had lethal consequences for newborns. Premature and low-birth-weight infants who require incubators, warmth, oxygen, and specialised feeding have died due to exposure to harsh weather conditions, infection, dehydration, and starvation. Mothers have been forced to watch their babies weaken and die, unable to protect or nourish them amid Israel’s ongoing restrictions on baby formula, safe shelter, and freedom of movement. These harms are not incidental; they are the predictable, and intended, outcome of policies that deliberately create conditions of life incompatible with survival.

Testimonies collected from mothers across Gaza reveal repeated patterns of newborn deaths from hypothermia after families were forced to return to tents or destroyed homes immediately following birth. These deaths were entirely preventable. They occurred as a direct result of Israel’s genocidal policies and purposeful dismantling of the most basic protections required for infant survival, including warmth, shelter, nutrition, and healthcare. The trauma of these losses reverberates through mothers’ lives, compounding physical injury with profound psychological suffering and long-term harm to reproductive health and fertility.

Despite binding provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice requiring Israel to allow the unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid and ensure access to essential supplies, Israel continues to restrict and obstruct assistance across the Gaza Strip. These actions disproportionately and deliberately impact pregnant, lactating, and postpartum women, whose physiological vulnerability and reliance on medical care and proper nutrition make them uniquely exposed to harm.

Taken together, the evidence demonstrates a methodical and systematic assault on Palestinian mothers and reproductive life generally, constituting a wide array of international crimes:

• The deliberate infliction of starvation and creation of a manmade famine amount to starvation as a method of warfare and the genocidal acts of creation of conditions of life calculated to destroy, killing, and causing serious bodily and mental harm;

• The severe physical and mental injury to mothers as a result of its wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, in particular maternal health facilities, and blockade of medical supplies, hygiene products, shelter provisions, etc. amounts to the war crimes of torture and inhumane treatment and wilfully causing great suffering. It equally constitutes the crimes against humanity of torture and potentially other inhumane acts, in light of Israel’s deliberate infliction of foreseeable harm due to the denial of medical care.

• Due to the distinct and disproportionate harm inflicted on pregnant, birthing and postpartum women – revealed through any gender-competent, intersectional analysis – also constitutes the crimes against humanity of persecution on the basis of gender; and the inhumane acts of apartheid based on discriminatory treatment of Palestinian women based on race, which is carried out with the intention of maintaining a regime of racial domination of Israeli Jews over the Palestinian people.

• Lastly, due to Israel’s intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, such harm also constitutes the genocidal act of causing serious bodily or mental harm and the imposition of measures intended to prevent births due to reproductive violence not only destroying individual lives but undermining the future of an entire population by impacting future health (of mothers and babies) and fertility;

• Where mothers have lost their life due to the acts outlined above, it constitutes the war crime of wilful killing, the crime against humanity of extermination, persecution, and apartheid, and the genocidal act of killing.

The violence inflicted on Palestinian mothers is not only an attack on individual women and children, but an assault on the survival, dignity, and future of an entire people. Immediate international action is urgently required to end Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, ensure accountability, and bring an end to Israel’s unlawful occupation and settler-colonial apartheid regime.