Intergenerational Gendered Violence in Palestine: Women’s Testimonies from the Nakba to the Gaza Genocide

This paper examines the continuity and transformation of gendered violence across key historical junctures in Palestine, tracing trajectories from the Nakba of 1948 to the genocide in Gaza. It situates gendered violence not as episodic or exceptional, but as a structural feature of settler colonial domination embedded within political systems that regulate Palestinian life. Central to this analysis is how women’s bodies, reproductive capacities, caregiving labour, and social and communal infrastructures are targeted as part of broader regimes of dispossession, control and erasure. Drawing on oral histories from first, second and third-generation Nakba survivors alongside contemporary testimonies from women enduring siege, forced displacement, starvation, and imprisonment in Gaza, the paper develops an intergenerational account of how violence is experienced, narrated and transformed across time. It extends the analysis of gendered harm beyond physical or sexual violence to include forced displacement, incarceration, famine, family separation and the destruction of social and ecological life, highlighting how these forms of violence are enabled and intensified through international complicity and support for colonial structures. Methodologically, the paper adopts a decolonial feminist approach grounded in ethnography and oral history centring women’s narratives as epistemic interventions against colonial erasure. It argues that intergenerational storytelling functions not only as historical transmission but also as a practice of resistance through which Palestinian women assert authorship over their own histories.