Israel is carrying out 'reproductive genocide' against Palestinians
Israel has for decades carried out a “reproductive genocide” of the Palestinian people, obliterating medical institutions, executing women and children and degrading the lived environment to such a point that it results in infertility, a new report says.
This practice, the Palestinian Feminist Collective report contends, has accelerated since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, with the intention of making it impossible for Palestinian life to continue.
Last week, the UN’s top investigative body on Palestine and Israel concluded that Israeli forces had deliberately targeted Palestinian children as a central element of their assault on Gaza.
The UN’s report examined the full scope of harm inflicted on children, from precision shootings by snipers and drones, to torture in detention, reproductive violence and the destruction of schools and hospitals.
Israel has killed more than 21,000 Palestinian children since October 2023, with a further 5,160 children estimated to be buried under rubble, according to the UN report. As of October 2024, at least 15,000 children had lost their mothers.
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In one case documented by the UN, the cutting of electricity by Israeli forces at al-Nasr paediatric hospital led to the death of four babies, whose decomposed bodies were later discovered still attached to defunct life support machines.
At the beginning of the genocide, the United Nations estimated that there were 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, giving birth to 5,500 babies each month. Many required a form of emergency care that has been rendered impossible by the Israeli military.
Miscarriages at the time rose by over 300 percent, as widespread malnutrition, anaemia and a lack of prenatal supplements intensified the risks of pre-term birth, low birth weight and fatal bleeding during labour.
'A predatory state'
The 188-page Palestinian Feminist Collective report, titled A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians and supported by the Progressive International, notes that with clean water, menstrual products and basic supplies to Gaza blocked by the Israelis, many Palestinian women “resorted to homemade pads or taking birth-control pills to stop their periods”.
Drawing on research conducted between December 2025 and April 2026, it brings together survivor and witness testimonies, declassified Israeli archives, Palestinian oral histories, academic research, documentary evidence, media reporting, human rights documentation, and United Nations reports and statements.
'Palestinian mothers in Gaza have been left to shoulder the impossible task of giving life and caring for their children'
- Palestinian Feminist Collective
In Gaza, bombed hospitals have no fuel, electricity, anaesthesia or sterile equipment, forcing Palestinian women to give birth in overcrowded shelters, homes or on the rubble-strewn streets.
International doctors who have worked in Gaza have described the horror of performing surgery – including Caesarean sections – without anaesthesia. New mothers have been unable to access basic goods that are taken for granted almost everywhere in the world: nappies, food, water and baby formula.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has partly operated, the report argues, “through the systematic destruction of reproductive healthcare facilities and other everyday infrastructures that make Palestinian life precarious, as well as impossible”.
Israel has destroyed maternity wards and IVF clinics in Gaza. The military’s use of weapons like white phosphorus and other toxic munitions “will have long-term, inter-generational effects on fertility,” the Palestinian Feminist Collective says.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian mothers remain the sole caretakers of their families as widows or partners to political prisoners, while thousands more have been severed from their families because of systematic expulsions and incarcerations.
“Palestinian mothers in Gaza have been left to shoulder the impossible task of giving life and caring for their children despite the widespread starvation, displacement, and disease,” the report says.
Murdered mothers
The Palestinian Feminist Collective highlights the cases of Rania Abu Anza and Jomana Arafa, two women from Gaza.
Abu Anza went through ten years of IVF treatment until she finally gave birth to twin babies, Naeim and Wissam. Both babies were killed in an Israeli air strike, along with their father, in March 2024.
Two days after Arafa gave birth to twins, she was killed, along with her babies and her own mother, while the family was seeking shelter in an Israeli-designated “safe humanitarian zone”. Her husband had gone to retrieve the birth certificates of the two newborn children, and so was not killed.
These cases are described in the report as “only the tip of the iceberg”.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has reported that the Israeli military systematically targeted reproductive healthcare facilities, all but exterminating maternity wards, prenatal treatments, fertility clinics and neonatal intensive care units.
For the first time in Gaza’s history, famine broke out in the Palestinian enclave because of severe Israeli limitations on access to food.
The report highlights the historical Israeli fear of Palestinian reproduction. In 1995, it cites, Israeli geographer Arnon Soffer warned that “the most serious threat Israel faces is the wombs of Arab women,” and argued that Palestinian birth rates endangered Israel’s national security.
Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, remarked that her nightmares stemmed from the knowledge that “another Palestinian child will be born”.
Responding to the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report, Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said: “It is an indictment of a system that has transformed Palestinian life - bodies, homes, families, reproductive existence, and even the dead - into instruments of control and domination.
“It is time to understand that the crimes against the Palestinians - including the sexualised and gender-based violence meticulously researched and exposed in this report - is not a total sum of isolated abuses, but a system of domination, oppression and erasure,” Albanese said.
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