Prevented Worlds and the Devastating Impact of Israeli Genocide on Community-Led Interventions on Family Violence in Gaza

Abstract

This article examines how Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has prevented emergent, community-led interventions against family violence (FV) that were being developed before October 2023. Drawing on decolonial ethnography and participatory action research (PAR) conducted across Gaza’s five governorates before the genocide, alongside post-October 2023 autoethnographic and digital ethnographic material, the article asks what happens when an antipatriarchal, community-led project of legal, social and institutional reform is violently interrupted. The article develops the concept of ‘prevented worlds’ to theorise genocide as a chronopolitical form of settler-colonial violence: one that not only destroys lives, homes, institutions and infrastructures, but also interrupts trajectories of social repair and forecloses gender-just futures already in formation. Building on Palestinian feminist scholarship, decolonial feminism, intersectionality, and Seth Anziska’s account of prevention, the article extends prevention from the level of sovereignty to everyday social worlds, including community protection, legal reform and anti-FV organising. Methodologically, the article treats the interruption of PAR not as research failure, but as evidence of prevention itself. Empirically, the article shows how genocide dismantled anti-FV interventions by targeting the people, places and pathways that made them possible. Women activists, service providers, community leaders, cultural venues, legal institutions and family protection networks were killed, displaced, destroyed or rendered inaccessible. At the same time, genocide intensified gender-based violence (GBV) and FV through overcrowding, displacement, orphanhood, widowhood, economic precarity, legal collapse and the erosion of informal and institutional routes to protection. The article argues that colonial violence does not merely coexist with patriarchal violence; it reproduces, intensifies and weaponises it.