Forced Marriage during Genocide in Gaza: Displacement, Protection, and the Loss of Childhood

This study interrogates the forced marriage of Gazan girls during the ongoing genocide and mass displacement, exposing the practice as a direct outgrowth of engineered deprivation, violence, and the systematic destruction of protective social structures. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with thirty displaced adolescent girls in Rafah, the study examines how forced marriage is justified within families as a survival strategy under conditions of siege, poverty, and threat of sexual violence, while operating as a mechanism of commodification, emotional severance from childhood, and the loss of education, natal-family protection, and agency. The findings show how families, facing relentless deprivation and insecurity, “trade” daughters for a semblance of safety, with legal and customary frameworks facilitating the erasure of girls’ rights through coerced marriage. Far from offering protection, forced marriage entrenches trauma, social isolation, and gendered dispossession, functioning as part of the logic of genocidal violence. The normalization of these practices under siege underscores the need for structural interventions that address not only immediate humanitarian needs but the systems of oppression that produce and sustain forced marriage.