Gendered survival under genocidal violence: A decolonial feminist narrative study of women and displaced families in Gaza

Drawing on qualitative narrative testimonies from 35 displaced Palestinian refugee women collected during the 2024–2025 assault, the study illuminates the relational, embodied, and ethical labor through which life is sustained under siege. Using a decolonial feminist psychological framework, the study integrates structural analysis, narrative interpretation, and thematic mapping across six experiential domains: rupture of home, cyclical displacement, embodied precarity, silenced endurance, maternal survival work, and testimony as presence. The analysis challenges dominant trauma paradigms by situating emotional and bodily experiences within ongoing colonial violence, enclosure, and infrastructural collapse. Findings demonstrate how care, vigilance, moral restraint, and relational commitments form a coherent survival praxis. The study contributes to transnational feminist scholarship by foregrounding locally grounded knowledge production and offering an alternative understanding of psychological life that resists depoliticization and pathologization. • Decolonial feminist narrative study of women's survival in Gaza's genocidal violence • Shows how displacement reshapes space into gendered sites of resistance and memory • Reveals women's agency and collective care as central to survival under warfare