Hunger and the Palestinian Womb

Abstract

This article theorizes the Palestinian womb as both a site of Zionist colonial violence and Palestinian futurity through the story of Shema, a young woman who became pregnant and gave birth during Gaza’s ongoing genocide. Drawing on decolonial Palestinian feminism and Indigenous feminist scholarship, I argue that Israel’s weaponization of starvation constitutes a gendered assault on Palestinian social reproduction, targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity. Shema’s narrative—from her interrupted wedding in October 2023 through forced displacement, miscarriage, and ultimately the birth of her son Youssef amid bombardment and acute malnutrition—reveals how genocide operates not only through military violence but also through the systematic destruction of life’s conditions. Her testimony illuminates what Shalhoub-Kevorkian terms genocidal “unchilding” and what I theorize as the colonial targeting of reproductive futures. Yet Shema’s story also embodies revolutionary mothering as insurgent care work, refusing to cede the future despite engineered hunger and psychic siege. Situating her experience within genealogies of anti-colonial resistance, I argue that storytelling itself becomes decolonial praxis—a refusal of erasure and a sacred map toward collective liberation. Grounded in intimate testimony and critical analysis, this work demands feminist engagement with starvation as reproductive violence and Palestinian life-making as radical resistance.