Stolen Bodies, Silenced Graves: Gender-Based Violence as Political Strategy in Iran and Palestine

Written by Imaan Ashraf, BA Politics and International Relations.

"We are urged to consider Sara Zirak's evidentiary question: Where are the bodies of Iranian women? The answer lies in systematic political erasure."

The Iranian regime’s metaphor of women as ‘flowers’, reveals a logic of expendability that has defined the treatment of Iranian women following the 1979 Revolution.

While women stood at the forefront of protests beginning on December 28th, official death records remain overwhelmingly male. And so, we are urged to consider the evidentiary question that Iranian-Gilak writer Sara Zirak asks: Where are the bodies of Iranian women? The answer lies in systematic political erasure. The HANA human rights organisation documented approximately 50 women from Tehran protests held as ‘unidentified’ at the Kahrizak forensic complex - their bodies subject to guarded transfers and restricted family access.

The Islamic Republic controls hospital records, forensic documentation, burial permits, and the media. When documentation becomes a tool of state power, erasure transforms into a political weapon. Sexual violence compounds this erasure. Documentation submitted to Parliament by the Foreign Policy Centre details the systematic abuse following the 2009 post-election crackdown, noting: sexual humiliation, threats against reproductive freedom, and forced gynecological examinations. In a society where stigma around sexual violence remains profound, even the possibility of abuse silences families, preventing public mourning and accountability. This necropolitical strategy operates through morgue ledgers as much as violence itself - physical loss followed by administrative disappearance.

These tactics are also present within Palestine. ‘More than a human can bear,’ this is how the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights describes its findings on Israel's systematic use of sexual, reproductive, and gender-based violence against Palestinians. Commission Chair Navi Pillay concluded there is ‘no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.’

Documented violations include forced stripping, sexual harassment, and sexual assault carried out under explicit military orders. Israel has dismantled Gaza's healthcare infrastructure, including maternity wards and the main in-vitro fertilisation clinic. This, combined with siege conditions blocking essential medications has forced women to die from preventable complications. These all qualify as crimes against humanity.

Palestinian women are forced to give birth in military checkpoints and undergo surgery without anaesthesia during bombardments. Bodies disappear into the ‘Cemetery of Numbers’, buried without identification. These practices fulfil genocidal acts under the Rome Statute of the ICC: inflicting conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction and imposing measures intended to prevent births, representing strategic warfare against Palestinian biological, and cultural continuity.

When reproductive healthcare access becomes a military target, we cannot ignore these modern tactics of erasure. Achille Mbembe's (historian) concept of necropolitics reveals how gender-based violence in Iran and Palestine functions as deliberate political warfare targeting women's bodies as sites of territorial control.

When Iranian families are denied their daughters’ bodies after protests, when Palestinian women undergo C-sections without anesthesia under bombardments, and when corpses are swallowed quietly by the earth into unmarked graves, we must confront the question: Are these tragedies coincidental? Or are they calculated outcomes, constructed by states wielding gender-based violence as political strategy, their oppressive reach following women into death?