first published on New Village Press substack on October 6, 2026
A timely poem and essay by Alice Rothchild.
Tomorrow marks three years since the escalation of brutality in Gaza began. In these grievous days, the stories of the Palestinian people rise even more prominently to the top of our minds.
There are those among us who have refused to lower their voices. There are poets who name what others will not. There are doctors who carry home what they have witnessed and set it down on the page so that it cannot be ignored. Alice Rothchild is one of them. A doctor, writer, filmmaker, and author of New Village Press’s Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, she begins this piece with a poem. The space between the words leaves room to pause, to take time with each phrase and consider what this violence has done to the people of Palestine. The reality of their devastation hangs in the air between each stanza. Each line holds the weight of the violence the one before it describes. In the essay that follows, she gives that violence the name the world has been so slow to speak: genocide.
As we share this piece, I urge you to reflect upon the ways in which you have been murmuring in spaces where justice will only be won by those who refuse to be quiet. We are proud to present Dr. Alice Rothchild’s “An Existential Crisis.”
—Alyse Andree
8/9/26
An Existential Crisis
October 7, 2023
when the Gaza war started
mothers reassured their children
the screech and rumble
earth quaking
windows fracturing
gardens cratering
echoes
were only fireworks
crackling the night sky.
a joyful wedding
end-of-school exams
tawjihi celebration.
how long were the children lulled
into disbelieving?
mothers now
wrap their beloveds’
gaunt bloodied bodies
in empty UNRWA flour sacks.
the hospitals exhausted
of shrouds.
if the excavators return
to build the gilded high-rise hotels
the promised Riviera
on the Mediterranean
the sleek bars and well-watered golf courses
they will unearth
the mangled bones of
mothers and children
teenage boys
uncles, grandmothers
farmers and fisherfolk
writers, poets, engineers
haunting the
graveyard
that is Gaza.
When one focuses on the women and children in Gaza, the horror and unending grief, the term reprocide, the killing of reproduction, creeps into the discourse. This is especially important in the context of naming the facts of a genocide, of creating a killing field, of deliberately destroying an entire people. The Genocide Convention definition from 1948 states:
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. This includes:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
The crimes of genocide are characterized not only by violently eliminating an existing population, but also by destroying the possibility of future generations. The intent to do just this was clearly expressed by a number of prominent Israeli leaders on repeated occasions. Israeli Defense Minister Katz recently noted that the widespread destruction of Gaza gave him “a good feeling.” Mass extermination was the military strategy. Reflecting on the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust, an Israeli psychiatrist friend of mine would say, shaking her head with an edge of bitterness, “They had good teachers.”
Upon analysis of the numbers, as of August 5, 2026, a staggering 73,381 people have been killed; experts agree this is an enormous undercount, bodies still buried in the rubble, wounded people dying after the initial injury from lack of antibiotics, medical equipment, follow-up care, unsanitary conditions. An estimated two-thirds of the dead are women and children who are assumed to be innocent victims. Gaza also has more child amputees per capita than any place in the world, a truly dubious distinction, and physicians report mass casualty events where infants and children were deliberately targeted with bullets to the head or chest.
A report in The Palestine Chronicle cites an article from the UK-based Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), “Pregnancy Under Fire: Reproductive Violence and the Destruction of Maternal Life in Gaza,” based on data from the UN and international humanitarian and medical agencies. The report warns that the Israeli assault on Gaza has inflicted “catastrophic harm on pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and newborns.” These critical groups are at risk for injury and death, and long-term “malnutrition, forced displacement and psychological trauma likely to shape the health and development of an entire generation of Palestinian children.” Women are also experiencing rising levels of miscarriages, stillbirths, and pregnancy complications. This is all magnified by the destruction of the Gaza health care system and the massive levels of toxic pollutants in the environment from the detritus of war and almost total destruction of buildings, with an estimated 60 million tons of dangerous materials contaminating the water, the air, and the soil in an area six by twenty-six miles.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) predicted that “~55,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza would face severe malnutrition by mid-2026.” With such prevalent maternal hunger, it is not surprising that 20% of babies born in Gaza now are premature or underweight. The capacity of the health care system to deal with these high-risk pregnancies and babies is severely limited; many women have little to no prenatal care and deliver without a skilled attendant, often in crowded shelters or makeshift tents.
Living in a war zone with the constant psychological stress of bombings, displacement, grief, and hunger also has lifelong effects on mothers and children and may interfere with offspring’s cognitive, physical, and emotional health for decades and perhaps intergenerationally. Data reveals that 12.2% of children suffer from stunting, a reflection of severe malnutrition, and lack of dietary diversity. The enormous threats to the resilience and future of Palestinians are both acute and chronic with no resolution in sight.
At the same time, it is important to remember that while women and children in Gaza are frequently portrayed solely as victims without agency, Palestinian women have a history of resistance. Since the 1936-1939 Great Arab Revolt, through the 1948 Nakba and, the First Intifada, to today, women have been active in the defense and survival of Palestine. Their resistance includes not only civil disobedience and supporting fighters and prisoners, but the daily refusal to succumb to the violence of war, occupation, and siege. This resistance is seen in the power of bearing and raising children, sustaining them physically and emotionally, holding memory and teaching resilience, maintaining traditions and a sense of personal dignity and pride in Palestine. To be in Gaza on Mother’s Day is to bear witness to the heartfelt love and respect for mothers, a joyous celebration for the people who are strong and central to family life and survival. Their resistance can be seen facing an Israeli soldier while they stand for hours at a checkpoint with children trying to get to school. It is teaching children in a makeshift tent after bombs have flattened the school. It is planting eggplant, tomatoes, grapes, tending goats, replanting and re-tending after each Israeli assault. It is digging children out of the rubble of a bombed, multigenerational home, and keening over their limp bodies. It is attending university, in person and online, against all odds, and graduating in medicine and law, engineering and journalism. These are all intensely personal acts and, at the same time, a testament to the political and historical power and agency that Palestinian women claim in their decades-long confrontation of the violent colonial legacy they have inherited. In Gaza, they are clearly being tested, and they are exhausted from being so resilient.
Much of the international community as well as large numbers of people in the United States understand the reality of the genocide in Gaza, largely made possible by U.S. military might and political cover, and the need for the U.S. and Israeli governments and individual leaders to be held accountable. Hopefully acts of accountability and the reining in of billions of dollars of support for Israel will not come too late for the women and children of Gaza.
Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker who loves storytelling that pushes boundaries and engages us in unexpected conversations. Alice co-founded Urban Woman and Child Health, Inc. in Jamaica Plain, MA in 1979. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years and served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School.