Gendering Israel’s war on Gaza: Do Palestinian men’s lives not deserve to be mourned?

Over the past month, each day unfolds with sobering news on the mounting death toll from Gaza and distressing reports of new Israeli airstrikes targeting homes, schools, and hospitals.

One detail about the dead, however, is repeated often in media coverage: the vast majority of murdered Palestinians in Gaza are women and children.

While this, in fact, is true, nowhere near this level of attention is given to the suffering and deaths of Palestinian men. Their names, faces, and stories are all often disregarded.

“It’s based on this assumption that women and children are considered innocent, weak, and in need of protection. It is unacceptable to kill them,” says Palestinian academic and researcher Dr Maisa Shquier in an interview with TRT World.

“And there seems to be a contrasting acceptance when it comes to killing men, as they are often perceived as default fighters," adds Shquier.

A resistance on all fronts

Palestinian men -and women-, however, play diverse roles in resisting occupation, extending beyond physical confrontation. Journalists, medics, humanitarian aid workers, filmmakers, writers, and many more all contribute significantly, illustrating the varied dimensions of the Palestinian resistance.

This “women and children” narrative ignoring Palestinian men’s suffering, overlooks these diverse efforts of Palestinians fighting against occupation, simultaneously reducing all Palestinian men to fighters.

Furthermore, Shquier highlights how this narrative also undermines the historical contributions of Palestinian women to resistance, both armed and unarmed, stating, “Palestinian women have been part of the Palestinian resistance even before 1948, on the ground with military resistance and other types of resistance. They were always the carriers of the Palestinian narrative.”

Demonising Palestinian armed resistance

On the other hand, the disproportionate emphasis on the death toll of “women and children” appears to be part of Israel’s broader strategy to demonise, particularly, armed resistance by Palestinians.

Today for Israel, this strategy also involves equating Hamas with Daesh and labelling all Palestinian men and boys pursuing freedom through armed resistance as 'terrorists' or 'aggressors'.

Many critics argue that this tactic aims to obscure the root cause of all Palestinian suffering – the occupation by the Israeli state.

It serves as a method to legitimise Israel’s attacks on Gaza and other Palestinian lands and to seek international support from its Western allies.

But who are these individuals that Israel seeks to demonise and brand as terrorists?

In a recent article, Dr Ayesha Khan from Vanderbilt University describes them as follows: “These Palestinian men engaging in armed resistance are not monsters— they were children trapped in a brutal cage without the option to escape.”

She describes these young men “as indigenous people seeking freedom from their colonisers, hoping that a future generation can experience a free Palestine, knowing they will not.”

She further details the conditions they’ve grown up in, describing a life drowning in violence - enduring ceaseless bombs and missile strikes, starvation, and brutal beatings by Israeli soldiers and settlers who seized their homes and burned their olive trees.

Witnessing their community's endless suffering, coping with chronic illnesses and disabilities caused by Israel’s ecological warfare that poisons their air, land, and water long after the bombs have levelled their neighbourhoods. They mourn death after death of their massacred loved ones.

These represent aspects of Israel’s enduring 75-year-long occupation and oppression of Palestinians, taking on diverse forms aimed at dehumanising them.

However, the Palestinian struggle tends to capture headlines predominantly through the rising death toll, regrettably receiving attention only when the proportion of women and children among the casualties is notably high.

How to avoid numbering discourse

Shquier emphasises the crucial need to avoid normalising the current numbering discourse and fragmenting Palestinian society into “women and children”.

Instead, there should be a concerted effort to focus on the lives and dreams of all Palestinians, irrespective of age or gender, while reporting on the events unfolding in Gaza, she says.

This approach aims to prevent the inadvertent demonisation of Palestinian resistance and promote inclusive empathy for all members of the Palestinian community– their men, women and children.

In Shquier's own words, "Let us know them more closely, not only as numbers—be it five children or eight women. Let us hear their personal stories. They had lives; they had dreams."