Femicide in the Context of Palestinian Medico-Legal Postmortem Practices: The Entanglement of Patriarchy and Colonialism

ABSTRACT: This article examines femicide in Palestinian society through a post-colonial feminist legal framework, highlighting how medico-legal postmortem practices operate as technologies of governance at the intersection of patriarchy and colonialism. Drawing on synthesized secondary archival materials, forensic reports, legal documents, and oral testimonies, the article explores how colonial, national, and patriarchal systems converge to regulate women’s bodies even after death. By tracing the historical development of femicide laws and postmortem practices across Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian legal systems, the article shows how women’s killings have frequently been hidden, silenced, or redefined as “honor” crimes or “natural” deaths—despite the fact that women were murdered over inheritance, disability, religious belief, different life style, love, or simply as an exercise of lethal control. Case studies presented in the article underscore how systemic legal failures such as reduced sentences, premature case closures, and culturalized framings of violence perpetuate immunity and impunity for perpetrators while exacerbating women’s precarity. Ultimately, the article argues that femicide in Palestinian society is not only a social and legal issue but also an epistemological and political struggle over justice, memory, and sovereignty.