By Ranjan Solomon
The killing of women in Palestine is not collateral damage. It is not accidental, incidental, or the unfortunate by-product of an over-militarised conflict. It is deliberate, systematic, and emblematic of a worldview in which Palestinian life is dispensable and Palestinian womanhood, in particular, is seen as a threat. The cruelty is not just in the act of killing; it is in the intention that underwrites it. Israel’s assault on Gaza—and the wider Palestinian people—is shaped by a doctrine that collapses civilian identity into an enemy category. In that collapse, women become targets twice over: as Palestinians and as bearers of the next generation.
The brutality faced by Palestinian women stands at the intersection of occupation, militarism, and patriarchal violence. In Gaza, women are not merely being killed by bombs; they are being starved, displaced, widowed, amputated, and stripped of the most basic guarantees of medical care. Pregnant women miscarry in rubble. Mothers die in queues for food. Daughters are buried without names because their bodies cannot be recognized. This level of cruelty is not incidental—it is engineered.
Every war reveals the moral architecture of a nation. Israel’s war on Gaza has revealed a scaffolding built on dehumanization. It is not only soldiers who speak with genocidal intent; it is ministers, parliamentarians, senior bureaucrats, and television anchors who have normalised the idea that Palestinian women are legitimate targets. They are framed not as civilians but as “mothers of terrorists,” as “breeders,” as demographic threats. When a state permits such language, violence becomes an administrative order rather than a battlefield accident.
The killing of women is also a deep political act. It signals an attempt to break the continuity of a people—not simply through demographic erasure, but through psychic devastation. Women hold families together; they are the transmitters of culture, memory, and community. In Palestinian society, where survival itself is resistance, women have historically been the backbone of the struggle. To kill them is to strike at the heart of resilience. Israel’s military planners know this. They know that by destroying women, they are wounding generations yet unborn.
What is particularly cruel is the way these killings occur: not in swift strikes alone, but in the slow violence of deprivation. Hospitals are bombed, maternity wards shut down, incubators stop functioning, and women who should be under medical supervision instead give birth under tents or in the open. The world has seen images of newborns wrapped in plastic bags or laid on the cold ground because the mother has died. These images are not accidents—they are the predictable outcomes of a siege that weaponises everything: water, food, medicine, electricity, and movement. When a pregnant woman is denied safe passage to a hospital and bleeds to death, she has not died of “circumstance”; she has been killed by design.
The cruelty deepens when one examines how global institutions respond. International bodies issue statements filled with moral equivalences and hollow appeals for restraint. Western governments that champion women’s rights in every forum suddenly turn blind, mute, and indifferent. The feminist movements that erupt in outrage at injustice elsewhere fall uncomfortably silent. In the hierarchy of global suffering, Palestinian women find themselves at the bottom, denied even the dignity of recognition.
And yet, women in Palestine continue to embody extraordinary courage. They search for their children in bombed-out ruins. They queue for food for hours, even when the sky rumbles with drones. They tend to the injured with almost no supplies. They mourn deeply, but they do not break. Even in the bleakest moments, they speak of their dignity, their rights, and their homeland. Their grief is political, their resilience is political, and their existence is political.
To write about the killing of women in Palestine is not simply to catalogue horror; it is to expose the failure of global morality. A civilization that tolerates such cruelty stands indicted. The world that claims to protect human rights, gender equality, and international law is collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy. If the systematic killing of women cannot trigger moral outrage, then what truly remains of our collective conscience?
The struggle for Palestine is not confined to borders or geography. It is a struggle over what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by brutality and indifference. The killing of women is not a footnote in this war—it is its defining signature. The violence inflicted on them must be documented, named, politicized, and remembered. It must harden global resolve, not numb it.
History will ask a simple question: in the age when Palestinian women were being starved, bombed, and erased, did we remain silent? The answer will judge not only states and leaders, but the soul of humanity itself.
In solidarity
Ranjan Solomon
27 November 2025
Source: nakbaliberation.com