Annihilated Families and the Politics of Mass Graves: Testimonies of Gazan Women After the Loss of Entire Kin Networks

Clinical Impact Statement

This study demonstrates that trauma in Gaza cannot be adequately understood or treated as an individual psychological disorder detached from its political and spatial determinants. The findings show that systematic violence—through mass killing, domicide, and spatiocide—produces cumulative, relational, and spatially embedded trauma that disrupts kinship systems, social roles, and intergenerational continuity. Clinical presentations among survivors include embodied distress, moral injury, dissociation, hypervigilance, and profound disruptions in future-oriented imagination, all occurring under conditions of ongoing threat.

For clinicians, these results underscore the limitations of individualizing, symptom-focused trauma models when working in contexts of exterminatory violence. Effective intervention requires approaches that recognize the destruction of home, lineage, and social belonging as central psychosocial mechanisms of harm. Mental health care in such contexts must be culturally grounded, relationally oriented, and attentive to disrupted mourning practices, survivor guilt, and the burden of carrying collective memory.

The study highlights the necessity of justice-informed and structurally aware clinical frameworks that integrate advocacy, community reconstruction, and restoration of social continuity into therapeutic practice. Healing, in this context, is inseparable from restoring safety, dignity, and the material and relational foundations of life.

Introduction

Mass violence and extermination are not only episodes of acute killing; they are projects that aim to destroy the social, cultural, and political conditions that enable a targeted population to continue existing as a collective entity (Card, 2003; Powell, 2011; Repo, 2025; Shaw, 2015; Short, 2016; Üngör, 2015). In genocide studies, this broader ambition is often described as the destruction of a group’s social existence, extending beyond bodily harm to the dismantling of the conditions necessary for collective life. Psychological scholarship has examined the mechanisms that make such violence possible, including dehumanization, moral disengagement, obedience dynamics, threat-based identity narratives, and the routinization of cruelty through bureaucratic and military systems (Bandura, 2017; McDoom, 2012; Savage, 2013). In exterminatory contexts, violence rarely results from a single cause; rather, it emerges through a convergent ecology of ideological justifications, institutional arrangements, and social pressures that normalize extreme harm (Pansera, 2025). This broader understanding of genocide is also reflected in the work of Powell (2011) and Short (2016). Powell conceptualizes genocide as a process aimed at destroying the social relations and institutional structures through which groups reproduce themselves over time, emphasizing that collective existence depends on more than physical survival. Similarly, Short argues that genocide often operates through the systematic destruction of the social, cultural, environmental, and material conditions necessary for a group’s continued life. Together, these perspectives extend analyses of mass violence beyond direct killing and highlight how attacks on homes, kinship networks, memory, and everyday infrastructures can function as mechanisms of collective destruction.

Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship further emphasizes that exterminatory violence is often inseparable from projects of territorial control and colonial domination (Chepeka, 2025). In settler-colonial contexts, violence is rarely limited to bodies alone. Instead, it targets the material and relational infrastructures that sustain collective life, including homes, land, movement, kinship networks, schools, and cultural memory (Handel & Kotef, 2023). Psychological research on mass violence has therefore increasingly incorporated spatial concepts that capture how the destruction of place functions as a technology of elimination.

One such concept is domicide, which refers to the systematic destruction of homes as a form of violence that undermines safety, identity, continuity, and the material conditions of social reproduction (Akesson, 2023; Atkinson, 2012). As Azzouz (2023) argues, the destruction of home is not merely a consequence of war but a deliberate form of violence that targets the social, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of dwelling. Homes function not only as physical shelters but also as repositories of memory, relational bonds, and intergenerational belonging. Their destruction therefore produces psychological consequences that extend beyond displacement or material loss. A related concept, spatiocide, describes political strategies that fragment territory, restrict mobility, and reorganize space in ways that render a population’s life-world increasingly unlivable (Hammad, 2023; Huss & Altehe, 2024). When violence operates through the restructuring and destruction of space, trauma cannot be understood solely as an intrapsychic injury; it becomes a relational and environmental rupture produced through the dismantling of the material and symbolic scaffolding of everyday life (Mushtaq, 2025). In this sense, spatiocide and domicide can be understood as concrete mechanisms through which the broader processes identified in critical genocide scholarship are enacted: by destroying homes, neighborhoods, infrastructures, and the spatial conditions of social reproduction, violence targets not only individual bodies but also the collective forms of life, belonging, and continuity that enable a group to persist across generations (Card, 2003; Powell, 2011; Short, 2016).

These insights challenge dominant trauma frameworks that treat distress primarily as an individual clinical condition. Critics of mainstream trauma models argue that such frameworks often universalize Euro-American diagnostic categories while neglecting colonial histories and structural violence that produce continuous traumatic stress rather than discrete traumatic events (Bracken, 2001; Bryant, 2024; Scuro, 2023). Recent genocide studies have similarly highlighted how trauma becomes embedded in disrupted relationships to place, memory, and belonging. For example, research on “displaced memory” demonstrates how forced displacement and the destruction of lived environments can fragment personal and collective remembrance, producing forms of suffering that exceed conventional symptom-based understandings of trauma and are inseparable from histories of violence, dispossession, and social rupture (Veronese et al., 2026).

Frantz Fanon’s work remains foundational for this perspective. Fanon conceptualized colonialism as a system that reorganizes subjectivity through racialized domination, humiliation, and spatial enclosure (Fanon, 1970). Contemporary decolonial psychology has expanded this insight by examining how colonization produces enduring psychic and relational injuries that remain active across generations (Hook, 2025; Lazali, 2021; Veronese & Kagee, 2025). Within such contexts, fear, grief, and hypervigilance cannot be interpreted simply as symptoms; they often represent coherent responses to environments structured by chronic threat and political violence (Takaendisa, 2025).

These perspectives on genocide and trauma are particularly relevant for understanding the situation in Gaza, where scholars have long analyzed how spatial governance operates as a mechanism of domination. Hanafi’s concept of spatiocide describes policies that fragment territory, regulate mobility, and render Palestinian presence precarious through legal and infrastructural mechanisms (Hanafi, 2023). These spatial dynamics have profound psychological implications, affecting experiences of belonging, safety, and the capacity to imagine a viable future in place.

Recent scholarship increasingly describes the scale of destruction in Gaza through frameworks such as domicide, urbicide, and spatiocide, which capture the systematic dismantling of homes, neighborhoods, and public infrastructures (Hassoun et al., 2025; Sobout, 2025). At the same time, the terminology used to describe this violence remains politically contested in international arenas. Legal debates regarding genocide are ongoing, including proceedings initiated by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (Swart, 2025). Regardless of legal determinations, the scale of destruction and displacement in Gaza demands conceptual frameworks capable of linking violence against persons with violence against the material and social conditions of life (Hamamra, 2026).

A decolonial psychological approach, therefore, treats trauma in Gaza as emerging from the intersection of event and structure. Extreme violence is not limited to discrete episodes of harm but is intensified by the ongoing reorganization of everyday space. When homes are destroyed, mobility becomes dangerous, and infrastructure collapses, and the environment itself becomes a continuous source of psychological strain (Perera, 2013). The destruction of neighborhoods simultaneously undermines safety, community, and social reproduction, producing cumulative forms of trauma embedded within the physical landscape (Eyerman, 2019).

Within this framework, psychological research must move beyond purely clinical interpretations of distress. Decolonial scholarship cautions against reducing suffering in Gaza to prevalence rates or diagnostic categories alone, as such approaches risk depoliticizing the structural conditions that produce trauma (Jabr & Berger, 2023). Instead, scholars increasingly advocate multi-level models that integrate psychological processes, social dynamics, and spatial-political structures (Malkinson et al., 2025). This perspective does not reject clinical psychology but situates it within a broader analysis of power, history, and environment (Hamamra, 2026; Veronese et al., 2026).

Accordingly, this study adopts a postcolonial and decolonial psychological perspective to examine how mass violence in Gaza reshapes experiences of trauma, mourning, and social belonging. By focusing on testimonies from women who survived the destruction of entire kin networks, the research explores how exterminatory violence intersects with domicide and spatiocide to produce forms of suffering that extend beyond individual trauma. In doing so, the study seeks to contribute to violence and trauma scholarship by situating psychological distress within the broader political and spatial conditions that shape everyday life in Gaza.

Methods

The Methods section is structured in accordance with qualitative research reporting conventions commonly adopted in psychology and violence research, including participant characteristics, data collection procedures, analytic strategy, and reliability procedures.

The study was conducted using trauma-informed qualitative research principles adapted to contexts of ongoing mass violence. Interview procedures prioritized participants’ safety, autonomy, and emotional wellbeing, including the right to pause, skip questions, or terminate the interview at any time. Consistent with decolonial approaches to trauma research, distress was not treated as an individual pathology but as a response to ongoing structural and political violence. Particular attention was paid to minimizing re-traumatization, respecting participants’ control over their narratives, and creating opportunities for testimony that recognized survivors as knowledge producers rather than merely subjects of research.

Results

Thematic analysis of the interviews identified six interconnected themes: (1) the instant erasure of entire family lines, (2) living through mass loss, (3) identifying the dead under conditions of mass death, (4) mass graves and disrupted mourning, (5) surviving as the sole remaining family member, and (6) memory and lineage erasure. Across themes, participants described how mass violence simultaneously destroyed family networks, disrupted mourning practices, and placed survivors in positions of social and emotional isolation.

The themes presented below were identified across multiple interviews and reflect recurring patterns of meaning within participants’ narratives. Consistent with qualitative TA, the emphasis was placed on the interpretive significance and richness of themes rather than on the frequency with which particular experiences were reported.

Discussion

This study set out to examine how extreme and exterminatory violence is lived, interpreted, and psychologically embodied in a context marked by prolonged colonial domination, siege, and large-scale destruction. Adopting a postcolonial and decolonial psychological perspective, the analysis aimed to understand trauma not as an isolated clinical outcome but as a process produced through the systematic targeting of bodies, homes, space, and the conditions of collective life (Goozee, 2021). The themes that emerged must therefore be read as interrelated expressions of mass violence operating simultaneously at psychological, physical, social, and spatial levels.

Across themes, participants’ narratives reveal that violence is experienced not only as episodic terror but as an ongoing condition of annihilation. This aligns with genocide and mass violence psychology, which emphasizes that exterminatory contexts are characterized by cumulative harm, moral injury, and the collapse of meaning systems rather than by single traumatic events (Cavazzoni et al., 2025; Meierhenrich, 2007). The findings demonstrate that psychological suffering is inseparable from the destruction of the material, relational, and symbolic conditions that sustain collective life. Consistent with Powell’s (2011) account of genocide as the destruction of social figurations and institutional relations, and Short’s (2016) emphasis on the dismantling of the conditions necessary for group existence, participants’ narratives reveal trauma as emerging not only from exposure to violence but also from the collapse of kinship networks, homes, mourning practices, and intergenerational continuity. These findings therefore support decolonial critiques of trauma models that isolate the psyche from the historical, political, and relational worlds through which social life is reproduced.

A central theme concerns the annihilation of home, which participants consistently described as an assault on safety, identity, and continuity (Atkinson, 2012). The destruction of houses was not narrated merely as loss of property, but as the erasure of family histories, relational bonds, and intergenerational memory (Webster, 2024). This resonates directly with the concept of domicide, understood as a strategy of violence that targets the home as a psychosocial anchor. In this sense, domicide emerges as both a physical act and a psychological technology: by dismantling domestic space, violence penetrates the most intimate dimensions of subjectivity, destabilizing attachment, parental roles, and the sense of being protected in the world (Fenton, 2001). The findings support theoretical work arguing that in exterminatory settings, the home becomes a primary site of war precisely because it sustains social reproduction and emotional life (Ghadbian, 2025).

Closely connected to domicide is the theme of spatial suffocation and fragmentation, which reflects processes theorized as spatiocide (Shalhoub-Kevorkian et al., 2025). Participants’ accounts illustrate how movement restrictions, the destruction of neighborhoods and the disappearance of familiar landmarks generate a pervasive sense of disorientation and entrapment. Space is experienced as hostile, unpredictable, and lethal, producing chronic hypervigilance and anticipatory fear (Ajour, 2025). From a psychological standpoint, this confirms that trauma in such contexts is not only remembered but continuously reactivated by the environment itself. These findings underscore that spatial violence is not collateral damage but a deliberate mechanism through which collective life is rendered unlivable. Spatiocide thus functions as a form of slow extermination, eroding the possibility of stability, futurity, and belonging even in moments when overt violence subsides (Björkdahl et al., 2026; Huss & Altehe, 2024). In this respect, the findings resonate with scholarship emphasizing that genocidal processes may operate not only through direct killing but also through the gradual destruction of the social, material, and environmental conditions necessary for collective existence (Nixon, 2011; Short, 2016). Participants’ accounts suggest that the cumulative effects of displacement, infrastructural collapse, restricted mobility, and home destruction undermine the long-term viability of social life even beyond episodes of immediate violence.

Another key theme concerns the collapse of bodily and psychic boundaries under conditions of mass violence. Participants’ narratives frequently blurred distinctions between physical injury, psychological distress, and existential threat. Fear was described as embodied, exhaustion as moral and physical, and survival as occurring at the edge of human endurance. This convergence reflects what genocide studies describe as psychological and physical annihilation: a condition in which violence aims not only to kill but to exhaust, degrade, and undo the human capacity to feel, imagine, and relate (Abuward et al., 2025; Cavazzoni et al., 2025). The findings echo research on extreme trauma showing that dissociation, emotional numbing, and despair are not signs of individual dysfunction but adaptive responses to sustained exposure to annihilatory threat (Hawkins, 2025). The theme of mass graves and disrupted mourning practices further illustrates how violence extends beyond bodily destruction to affect the social and symbolic processes through which communities honor the dead, preserve memory, and sustain intergenerational continuity. The inability to perform culturally meaningful burial rituals intensified experiences of loss and contributed to fears of historical erasure, reinforcing arguments that exterminatory violence targets not only life itself but also the conditions through which collective memory is maintained.

Importantly, the themes also reveal that suffering is experienced collectively rather than solely individually (Hamamra et al., 2025). Loss is narrated through family disruption, altered caregiving roles, and communal grief, reinforcing decolonial critiques of individualistic trauma frameworks. The destruction of space and home fractures social networks, reconfigures kinship, and places disproportionate psychological burdens on caregivers, particularly parents. This supports mass violence psychology literature that emphasizes how exterminatory contexts target social bonds as a means of weakening collective resistance and survival (Kellezi et al., 2021). Participants’ accounts are consistent with Shaw’s (2015) understanding of genocide as a process directed not only against individuals but also against the social fabric of collective life, whereby the destruction of relationships, kinship networks, and communal forms of support becomes a central mechanism of group destruction.

Taken together, the findings suggest that genocide, domicide, and spatiocide operate as interlocking processes rather than discrete forms of violence. Psychological trauma cannot be analytically separated from the destruction of space, nor can physical harm be disentangled from the erosion of meaning and social continuity. We challenge depoliticized interpretations of distress and calls for trauma theories that remain accountable to structures of power, colonial histories, and the deliberate production of unlivable conditions (Meierhenrich, 2007).

From this perspective, the destruction of collective life emerges as a central psychological concern rather than merely a political or sociological one. Participants’ narratives reveal how violence acts simultaneously upon bodies, homes, kinship networks, burial practices, and systems of memory, disrupting the social figurations through which individuals locate themselves within a family, community, and historical lineage (Powell, 2011). Consistent with Shaw’s (2015) understanding of genocide as an assault on the social relations that sustain group existence, and with Short’s (2016) emphasis on the destruction of the conditions necessary for collective life, the findings suggest that psychological suffering arises not only from exposure to death and injury but also from the collapse of the relational, material, and symbolic infrastructures through which life becomes meaningful. Trauma, in this sense, is inseparable from processes of social death, in which the continuity of collective existence itself is threatened (Card, 2003).

Conclusion

This study has examined systematic and extreme violence as a psychosocial condition rather than as a series of discrete traumatic events. By situating individual suffering within a broader ecology of exterminatory practices—encompassing mass killing, domicide, and spatiocide—the findings underscore that mental health in contexts of genocide and mass violence cannot be meaningfully understood apart from the political and historical forces that produce unlivable worlds. Psychological distress emerges here not as an aberration but as a coherent response to sustained exposure to annihilatory power exercised over bodies, homes, and space.

At the individual level, extreme violence reshapes subjectivity through chronic fear, grief, moral injury, and the erosion of future-oriented imagination (Becker et al., 1998; Tulloch, 2008). The destruction of home and the saturation of space with threat disrupt basic assumptions about safety, continuity, and belonging, producing psychological states characterized by hypervigilance, exhaustion, and existential insecurity. These experiences align with research in the psychology of mass violence, showing that exterminatory contexts generate cumulative harm, in which trauma is continuously renewed by environmental cues and structural conditions rather than confined to memory alone.

At the community level, the implications are equally profound. Systematic violence fractures social bonds, reorganizes family roles under duress, and transforms collective mourning into a persistent condition of loss (Kizilhan, 2025). Community mental health is undermined not only through direct exposure to violence but through the dismantling of the social and material infrastructures that sustain care, solidarity, and meaning-making (Diab et al., 2018; Veronese et al., 2025). In such contexts, distress circulates relationally: it is carried by families, embedded in neighborhoods, and reproduced through the ongoing destruction of shared spaces (Zedan, 2025). These findings reinforce the necessity of moving beyond individualistic models of mental health toward frameworks that recognize collective suffering and communal resilience as inseparable.

A clear political and historical stance is therefore unavoidable. The determinants of mental health identified in this study are not accidental nor natural; they are the predictable outcomes of historically situated systems of domination, dispossession, and spatial control (Bhugra & Ventriglio, 2023; Shim et al., 2022). Colonial governance, prolonged siege, and policies that normalize the destruction of civilian life and infrastructure function as upstream determinants of psychological harm. To obscure these antecedents is to risk pathologizing victims while leaving intact the conditions that generate suffering. Thus, mental health must be understood as a political matter, shaped by whose lives are protected, whose homes are allowed to endure, and whose futures are rendered conceivable (Lazali, 2021).

Within this framework, healing cannot be reduced to clinical intervention alone. Historical responsibility—understood as accountability for the production and maintenance of exterminatory conditions—is central to any meaningful psychosocial recovery (Atallah & Abu-Jamei, 2025). The restoration of justice, the protection of life, and the recognition of the right to exist in place are not merely legal or moral imperatives; they are foundational psychosocial interventions. Without safety, continuity, and the possibility of a future, therapeutic efforts risk becoming palliative responses to ongoing harm. Conversely, the acknowledgement of historical violence and the active dismantling of its structures constitute forms of collective healing that no individual treatment can substitute.

Longitudinal and community-based studies are needed to trace how prolonged exposure to systematic violence reshapes mental health across generations, while participatory and decolonial methodologies can ensure that affected communities remain producers rather than objects of knowledge. Research should also attend to forms of resistance, care, and meaning-making that persist under conditions of annihilation, not as romanticized resilience but as critical resources for survival (Al-Hardan, 2014; Datta, 2018).

In terms of mental health and psychosocial support, the findings call for approaches that are collective, context-sensitive, and justice-oriented. Interventions must extend beyond symptom reduction to address disrupted social relations, communal grief, and the loss of place. Psychosocial programs should be embedded within broader efforts to restore safety, housing, education, and social infrastructure, recognizing that mental health cannot be sustained in the absence of livable conditions. Clinicians and practitioners working in such settings must be supported to adopt ethically grounded practices that acknowledge political realities rather than bracket them out (Makkawi, 2012, 2015).

Finally, implications for policy-making are explicit. Policies that tolerate or enable systematic violence are, by definition, policies that generate psychological harm. Mental health policy in contexts of mass violence must therefore be inseparable from human rights policy, international accountability, and the protection of civilian life and space. Preventing trauma requires preventing the conditions of extermination; supporting mental health requires supporting the right to exist with dignity, security, and continuity (Veronese & Kagee, 2025).

In conclusion, this study affirms that extreme and systematic violence produces profound psychosocial injury at both individual and collective levels, and that such injury is rooted in historical and political processes rather than isolated events. A decolonial psychological perspective demands that healing be understood not only as a clinical endeavor but as a struggle for justice, recognition, and the restoration of life itself.