The genocide in Gaza has laid bare the intimate relationship between colonial violence, the wounding of bodies and societies, and the conditions of collective survival. Beyond the staggering scale of death and injury, it reveals how violence operates not only through moments of attack, but through the systematic production of conditions that constrain the capacity to heal, reproduce, and sustain life. This panel explores how colonial violence extends beyond the immediate moment of injury, shaping bodies, social relations, and the possibilities of collective futures.
Moving beyond frameworks that locate injury solely within the individual, the panel considers the colonial wound as both a material and political condition. Wounds inflicted on Palestinian bodies are not only physical and psychological injuries, but also forms of governance that seek to control bodies and reshape colonised societies. At the same time, the ways Palestinian communities have confronted, cared for, and healed these wounds across generations point towards healing as a refusal of erasure and an act of resistance.
The panel further turns to reproduction as a site of colonial violence and resistance, examining how fertility, reproductive capacities, and the conditions of bringing life into being are implicated in the struggle over Palestinian life and its future. In this context, care and the practices of sustaining life cannot be understood as merely humanitarian responses to crisis, but as political practices through which communities resist the destruction and denial of collective futures. Bringing these perspectives together, the session asks how struggles over wounding, healing, reproduction, and life (un)making can deepen our understanding of Palestinian resistance and what meaningful solidarity demands.
Invited Speakers
Layth Hanbali
Layth Hanbali is a community health researcher. He is coordinating the Institute for Palestine Studies database: "Documenting the Targeting and Destruction of the Health Sector in the Gaza Strip." He is a PhD candidate in History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, researching anti-colonial resistance through health. He has a background in medicine and community and public health, with a medical degree from University College London and a master's degree in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Siggie Vertommen
Siggie Vertommen works as a researcher and lecturer in Gender and Global Health at the University of Amsterdam and Ghent University. Her research grapples with the social study of (assisted) reproduction, fertility and family (un)making from various feminist and anticolonial perspectives. She uses reproductive technologies, including transnational surrogacy, egg donation, and adoption as a lens to make sense of ongoing histories of (settler) colonialism and biocapitalism in Palestine, Georgia and Belgium.
Moderated By
Devanshi Saxena (she/they)
​Devanshi is a legal researcher affiliated with the Universities of Liège (EcoLAWgy, Faculty of Law, Political Science and Criminology) and Antwerp (Faculty of Law - Research Groups Law and Development and Government and Law). Drawing on decolonial feminist approaches, her research examines how law sustains colonial dispossession, knowledge appropriation and ecological harm and how it can listen and see differently. She explores whose voices count in governance, how power can be shared, and how collective action builds counter-power. Her scholarship and activism connect these questions to institutional responsibility, including that of universities, and to spaces for resistance and political agency.
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