Gendered technologies of genocide: Forced marriage and the collapse of protection for Gazan girls

This article examines the forced marriage of Gazan girls during genocide and mass displacement, not a residual cultural habit or private family choice. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in April 2025 with thirty displaced adolescent girls and young women in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Rafah, the paper displays how families under Israeli siege, bombardment, and deprivation frame marriage as protection and survival precisely when girls’ capacity to choose is most constrained. These dynamics unfold across households, courts, and corridors under occupation. Amid repeated displacement, hunger, sexual-violence threats, and collapsed legal and social safeguards, parents “trade” daughters for food, shelter, or a fragile sense of security; legal and customary arrangements then convert these coerced exchanges into formal marriages that erase childhood and agency. Read through settler colonial rule, necropolitics, reproductive justice, and feminist critiques of humanitarianism, forced marriage commodifies girls’ bodies, severs them from families, and redirects reproductive futures in ways that serve the ordering of life and death in Gaza. The findings show that, far from offering safety, forced marriage deepens trauma, isolation, and gendered dispossession. Any serious response must confront immediate humanitarian needs and the structures of Israeli domination, patriarchy, and economic exploitation that legitimize these unions.