by SADAF SHABBIR
Within the logic of settler-colonial warfare, the womb is a site of resistance and persistence.
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.
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