Dear Youssef,
My husband wanted a child from me. I wanted you so badly, and, at the same time, I was afraid. I was afraid that I would hurt you by bringing you into this world now—this world of bombing, displacement, hunger and pain. I was worried that I had chosen the wrong time to become a mother…The only person who makes me feel better is my husband—your father. He works hard to make things easier for me, despite the situation. I hope that God will comfort him and make him happy. I asked him for dates last week because…I had not eaten anything for two days and am breastfeeding. Would I be able to make enough milk to keep you alive?
The price of dates was very high. Your father bought them anyway. He hid the dates from everyone and brought them to me. (He felt he had done something wrong. He used to buy food for everyone, but, in this situation, he could not feed them.) We do everything we can so that we can survive. You, my child, and my husband are the most precious things I have in this world.
*
Shema wrote this letter on 21 July 2025. She addressed it to her son Youssef, who had been born just weeks earlier, amidst the terror and starvation enforced on the people of Gaza by the zionist regime during a now 21-month long genocide. As she described it, the desire to become a mother during conditions of genocide was difficult to hold. Her love for her child, and her husband—whose deep care was juxtaposed with guilt and shame—filled her with determination to keep going.
Shema, 23, first contacted me nearly a year ago, after reading a story I wrote about my friend Mona in Gaza. We stayed in touch, and one day she shared that she was pregnant. As the temporary ceasefire ended in March 2025, and zionist military forces began to again bomb, displace and terrorize the remaining population of Gaza, while also cutting off food and water supplies, thousands of pregnant women like Shema began to starve.
As a feminist, and mother to three Palestinian children myself, her story touched me. I checked in with her more frequently. I told my children about her. I invited my students to write letters of solidarity to her, and she responded. I prayed for Shema and her unborn child. Though I had never met her, Shema became part of our lives. The fragments I narrate here—messages, photographs, details that feel bursting with life yet somehow, incomplete—are part of what she shared with me. And as I waited to learn if her child would ever draw breath, I carried Shema’s voice like a thread of sun through rubble—fragile, defiant, and refusing to be buried.
Theorizing the Palestinian Womb
Shema messaged me just before the call to prayer on Friday, 7 March 2025. The Rafah border and Kerem Shalom crossings had been closed for five days during which not a single humanitarian food truck was permitted entry. Tomorrow, our people feared, they would cut off the electricity, effectively strangling Gaza’s only remaining clean water supply. Shema was waiting to break her fast, as part of the holy month of Ramadan. “There is no food other than rice,” she wrote me.
When I told her that I was writing a new piece about the starvation imposed on our people, and how this would affect pregnant women in Gaza in particular, Shema asked for her story to be included. But, she said, she wanted to start from the beginning. Shema’s request that I start not from within this moment of extreme deprivation, but from ‘before,’ implied a Palestinian imperative to contextualize not only the violence of genocide as a structure of ongoing Nakba, but also to enunciate the presence and potentiality of Palestinian life bursting from its seams.
Her messages carried me back to October 2023. Shortly before the genocide started, Shema had graduated from university. She was making preparations for her wedding, a day of joy and a moment of transition into a new phase of life.
“I was waiting impatiently for October,” she wrote me. “My bag and clothes were ready for my wedding and I was going to my future home, where I was photographing all the preparations.” Shema shared some of these photos and videos. In one photograph, she holds the key to her home, a leopard print keychain heart in her hands. In another, a row of eight champagne-pink suitcases, and baskets filled with housewarming gifts, each adorned with a bouquet of flowers. Embellished with a red tatreez border, the invitations to her henna party feature four Palestinian women proudly standing in their thobs.
“The wedding date was set for 10 October 2023,” Shema wrote. “I woke up on Saturday to violent shelling, the likes of which I had never witnessed before. I was shocked… I had planned to go to the bridal shop to pick up my wedding dress…”
“My fiancé came home and told me that the wedding was canceled, but we will get married anyway. My family did not agree at first, but on 2 November, they agreed. And so, I got married without a dress, without a wedding, and without happiness. I took a small bag and left with my husband.”
Instead of the communal joy and celebration she had anticipated for months, a chance to be held in loving community through one of life’s most sacred transitions, Shema shared a photo of the small suitcase, packed hastily, that would eventually sustain her in a prolonged displacement.
“We had not stayed in my house for a day until the school in front of us was bombed. After that, I was displaced to my husband’s uncle’s house. Then, [the zionist military] ordered us to evacuate. Everyone had to flee to Rafah. My family, my husband’s family, my grandmother, my grandfather, and all of our relatives went and we were displaced to a place 100 meters away. There were 50 of us. We slept like sardines.”
Through each displacement, each bombardment, the geography of Shema’s life was redrawn. Homes became rubble, kitchens became gravesites. She described the sleepless nights curled beside her sisters, their bodies huddled in fear, wondering whether the next moment would be their last.
“I was sleeping with my sisters next to each other. I didn’t know if they would kill us or abandon us. There was never any food. We ate one meal a day. After that, Rafah was evacuated. We went to my aunt’s house…” Shema narrated a series of displacements, punctuated by brief moments of respite while visiting and checking on her home.
“Unfortunately, there was no place to go to the land where we set up tents,” Shema continued, “We were many families and the area was not safe… The army was stationed near us. They were not good days. Bullets passed by me every day. My husband would tell me to be on the ground when he heard the sound of bullets… I did not want to become a mother at this time… but thank God I went and got checked and it turned out that I was pregnant.”
When Shema shared the image of her first ultrasound, it felt like a love letter smuggled out of war.
Days later, the area where Shema was staying was attacked. As she recounted, “I was preparing breakfast when I saw more than 10 Apaches very close to the ground. The children were happy to see the helicopters because they had never seen one before. A few minutes later, the Apaches started firing bullets and shells at all of Nusayrat… I was sure I would die that day.”
The day of the attack on Nusayrat was a terrifying one. She and her husband fled by foot, running without a safe destination. As they ran, the house in front of them was bombed. Finally, they found shelter in a school with dozens of other families. “The children were crying and the women fainted. It was a very difficult day… truly a day of judgment…”
A week later, she felt severe pain. “I couldn’t sleep. I went to the hospital and they told me that my baby was dying… I would have to have an abortion. Here, I tried to stay strong. I prayed, I talked to God. But my husband could not contain himself. He started crying for our child.. and I didn’t know what to do.”
The genocide had claimed her first child. Shema described feeling depressed, but not having the space to grieve. “The depression [gave way to] shock as my sister’s house was bombed. I started running towards them. They told me that my sister was fine, but my aunt and my cousins were martyred. I did not even get a chance to say goodbye to them because their bodies were shattered [into pieces]…”
In September 2024, Shema learned that she was pregnant again. “I was happy and afraid at the same time. Is there a future for this child? I was always praying. I thought this was a miracle that would ease the pain I was going through,” she wrote me.
When the temporary ceasefire was declared in January, she walked, now four months pregnant, amidst the crowds of people, the long road home. When she arrived, she found it had been destroyed. “There were no walls. It had been bombed. My clothes were burned. The zionist army had been sitting in my house. I saw the remnants of their food…” Because food was not readily available and exceedingly expensive, she ate from the fig tree in the garden to survive. Displaced again amidst the ruins of her home, she shared that she had begun selling her clothes in order to afford the basic necessities to prepare for her baby’s arrival.
Shema’s experience makes clear that zionist violence is not only militarized and hypervisible, but inscribes itself on the most intimate domains of Palestinian life: the rhythms of daily sustenance, the sanctity of family-making, and the daily labor of social reproduction. The interruption of Shema’s wedding, the miscarriage of her first child, and the conditions under which she carries her second pregnancy reveal how the colonial regime seeks not only to destroy life, but also to sever the intergenerational continuity of Palestinian communities. Her story offers a profound lens through which to theorize the Palestinian womb, as both a target of zionist colonial violence and a site of Palestinian futurity.
And yet, amid this devastation, Shema and her husband choose to affirm life. They marry without celebration, sheltering love under siege. Her refusal to surrender the future becomes a form of resistance. In this way, her story testifies to the intergenerational labor of Palestinian survival—a genealogy of the everyday struggle of Palestinian women to defend their reproductive capacities, not only biologically, but socially and politically. Shema’s care work—her grieving, her persistence, her prayers—enacts a refusal to cede the future. The womb under occupation is where colonial violence and decolonial love collide, and where, despite everything, the promise of Palestine is carried forward.
Hunger and the Womb
Israel’s well-documented use of starvation as a tool of genocide has had devastating consequences on Palestinians in Gaza, with pregnant women and children disproportionately affected. One of the most significant outcomes of the total siege imposed by Israel on 2 March 2025 is a sharp increase in malnutrition among Gaza’s population. The latest IPC analysis published on 22 August 2025 projected that the entire population in the Gaza Strip will face emergency levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 4 or above) by the end of September 2025, including the majority of the population in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5), characterized by an extreme lack of food, starvation, destitution and death. Critical levels of malnutrition also persist, with more than 70,000 cases of children under the age of five and 17,000 cases of pregnant and breastfeeding women (PBW) facing acute malnutrition across the occupied territory. Famine has officially been declared in Gaza for the first time.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, over 46,000 pregnant women in Gaza—like Shema—are enduring acute hunger, while UN Women reports that more than 557,000 women face extreme food insecurity. A growing number of women are losing weight during pregnancy, endangering their own survival and that of their unborn children. Newborns are increasingly being delivered underweight—below 2.5 kilograms—failing to meet basic international health standards. The consequences of mass starvation—a biological assault on the body and mind—are long term and potentially irreversible.
Forced starvation is not a collateral effect of war but a deliberate tactic that targets an entire people. As Palestinian feminist analysis insists, and as I have argued elsewhere, genocide operates not only through bombs and bullets, but also through the slow, grinding destruction of life’s conditions. In this, Palestine joins a long genealogy of indigenous communities subjected to hunger as a weapon of conquest—from the rations systems on Native reservations to the British-induced famines in colonial India and Ireland.
Annihilation of the intergenerational possibility of Palestinian life is achieved by targeting women and children—genocidal ”unchilding,” to use Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s term, and what Lama Khouri has termed ”unmothering.” Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminists have long theorized how the destruction of the womb is central to settler projects of domination. Malnutrition, toxic water, destroyed hospitals and the psychological trauma of starvation are not temporary crises; they become the inherited scars of a war on our very being. To confront this, we must understand this violence as reproductive, epistemic, gendered and racialized. Decolonial Palestinian feminism refuses this futurelessness. It insists that even in the face of engineered hunger, we carry forward the memory, the lineage, and the struggle for life that cannot be starved out.
We are called to confront not only the material violence of starvation, but also the psychic and spiritual wounds it inflicts. The slow violence of engineered hunger seeks to rupture our capacity to dream, to imagine beyond the cage of genocide. It is precisely here, in this space of psychic siege, that decolonial feminist praxis must intervene. When Palestinian children are starved, it is not only their survival that is targeted—it is their joy, their imagination, their becoming. Against this colonial unchilding, we must anchor ourselves in practices of collective care, ancestral memory, and revolutionary tenderness. To mourn and rage is necessary—but we must also nourish the spiritual muscle to refuse despair. Decolonial Palestinian feminism, like other Indigenous feminist traditions, insists that our liberation struggles are also struggles for breath, for beauty, for sustenance.
A Prayer Against Erasure: Storytelling, Starvation, and the Radical Act of Mothering
Shema described the days leading up to the birth of her child. “I dream of cucumbers, tomatoes, cantaloupe, and watermelon,” she wrote me one day. My own body remembered the intense craving for watermelon during my pregnancies. Her family went to great lengths to find food, her mother risking death to seek aid at the US-funded ‘distribution center’ in Netzarim, only to return beaten, bruised and empty handed.
Her messages became increasingly sparse in the days that followed. During her ninth month, Shema described being so tired—both physically and psychologically—that she could barely move from her makeshift bed within the tent.
“I was looking at the sky yesterday, it was very beautiful, and I talked to God. I wonder these days, does He not love me, is that why He does not help me? I always pray to Him every hour to ease the burden of these days…”
When I didn’t hear from Shema for days after that, I worried that she and her baby might be lost to this world. I wondered how she was surviving life in a sweltering tent at nine months pregnant with only a piece of bread each day to nourish her.
On 25 June 2025, Shema shared photographs of a beautiful baby, born just hours before. “I named him Youssef,” she wrote. I cried with joy at the relief that Shema was alive, and at seeing Youssef’s face for the first time. “It wasn’t easy or difficult,” she wrote, referring to the birth. “My water broke one hour in the middle of the night and I went to the hospital… I gave birth at ten in the morning amidst the sound of bombs.”
When I sent her my congratulations, Shema replied: “I am very happy with my baby. I hope that God will protect him. But…I have no food to eat. It is 2 pm now. I have not eaten anything since morning.”
In the days that followed, she described her first moments of motherhood as any mother would: joy mixed with exhaustion. But one thing was strikingly different: Youssef cried constantly through the night, awakening to the sounds of bombs. Shema struggled against persistent hunger. “My soul is exhausted,” she wrote.
Shema’s story embodies what Black and Indigenous feminists have named as revolutionary mothering—not as biological destiny, but as insurgent care work in the face of genocidal neglect. To birth amid bombs, to hunger while nursing, to dream of cucumbers while eating only bread—this is not simply survival, but a radical praxis of life-making against the machinery of death. In her aching body, in her whispered prayers, in her naming of Youssef under falling missiles, Shema enacts what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls “constellations of co-resistance,” where love becomes a tactical refusal to let the settler determine the shape of the future. Her mother’s bruised body reaching for aid, her own exhaustion curled into a tent’s corner, the quiet awe she finds in the sky—these are not mere details, but what Saidiya Hartman might describe as the grammar of suffering and care, an archive that exceeds the record, refusing to be reduced to statistics.
*
I have struggled amidst these last months to finish writing this story, to trace, in language, the contours of a wound still open.
I am watching now with quiet desperation, as many of us are, videos of young children perishing of malnutrition. Of women collapsing from hunger amidst the continuous bombing of tent cities.
I pray that Shema and baby Youssef will survive.
Hunger for Shema is not only the absence of food, but the embodied longing for safety, rest, tenderness, and the capacity to feed a child without fear. As Palestinian women, as mothers, we hunger for a world where our children are not born into siege but into sanctuary.
Despite the devastating reality and the looming feeling of hopelessness, I write this story as a refusal of my own despair. I refuse to be a documenter of my people’s annihilation. Instead, I choose to be a witness to the triumph of their survival.
Shema’s testimony is a rupture in the machinery of erasure, a trace that defies the settler archive’s demand for silence. Her story teaches us what decolonial, Indigenous, and women of color feminists have long known: that storytelling is not a luxury but a lifeline; not anecdote but epistemology. And so we tell her story not as exception, but as constellation. Because in the struggle for collective liberation, the singular is never solitary. Every life—named, held, remembered—is a sacred refusal. Every story is a map toward freedom. To tell one woman’s story is not simply a tale of survival against unthinkable odds, it is a living praxis of refusal, a prayer against erasure whispered into the night sky.
Acknowledgments
With love and gratitude to Shema, first and foremost, for trusting me with the most tender story. An early iteration of this piece was presented at the Decolonizing Gender and Sexualities Conference at UC Berkeley in March 2025; I thank Paola Bechetta and Courtney Desiree Morris for creating this space for collective and creative breath. Mira Mattar held this story’s development with the deepest love and care as editor, for which I am exceedingly thankful. Devin Atallah and our children provide the greatest, daily reminder that our love breaks all sieges; indeed, love is “contraband in hell.”
