“To be as sad as you want to be, to disconnect from your people’s pain — these are luxuries,” says Shatha Abusrour, a disability rights activist based in Bethlehem in the West Bank who coordinates disability advocacy across the West Bank and Gaza. “We don’t want to afford them.”
Abusrour tells me that she refuses to cave under the indescribable weight of genocide, refuses to turn away from her people regardless of her own despair. Her ethic is simple but unrelenting: Disconnection is a privilege, and the refusal to collapse is its own kind of fight.
This ethic plays out against staggering numbers. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 22,500 Palestinians now live with “life-changing injuries,” and Save the Children documented an average of 15 children per day acquiring permanent disabilities throughout 2024.
The targeting of Palestinian bodies through disablement isn’t new. During war, access to health care, mobility and assistive technology has always been weaponized. Under decades of occupation, Palestinians have documented systematic restrictions on medical supplies and equipment, delays at checkpoints that prevent health care access, and the destruction of rehabilitation centers, to name a few.
The Palestinian Disability Coalition, which Abusrour helps coordinate, documents these violations and submits reports to United Nations committees about how occupation creates and compounds disability. What’s different in the past two years or so is the scale and deliberateness of the violence. What was once a byproduct of occupation now appears to be a cruel strategy.
In October 2023, Abusrour resigned from her job with a U.S.-funded NGO. “I couldn’t be having my salary from the same region that is funding the killing of my people,” she says. For her, disability justice cannot be separated from anti-colonial solidarity. “We tried here and there, this and that,” she says. But ultimately, she concluded that the only people fighting for Palestinians were other Palestinians.
But what does it mean to fight for disabled people’s bodies when they have already been marked as disposable? As bombs explode and medical systems collapse, disability justice becomes both a front line and a framework — not only about inclusion, but survival. And increasingly, survival itself is disrupted by the deliberate targeting of disabled bodies.
People with prosthetic limbs told me they saw it firsthand. [Soldiers] would remove the prosthetic limb, break it, and say, ‘You don’t need it anymore.’
Shatha Abusrour, disability rights activist based in Bethlehem
“You move beyond these conventions of disability as part of the natural diversity of a community, and into a situation in which an entire people is being disabled,” says Hernan Bonomo, co-founder of the Disability Justice for Palestine, or DJ4P, collective in Bangkok.
Abusrour often works with Palestinians who have been injured and acquired permanent disabilities and describes the multilayered abuse that’s been reported to her. “People with prosthetic limbs told me they saw it firsthand. [Soldiers] would remove the prosthetic limb, break it, and say, ‘You don’t need it anymore.’”
Bonomo recounts a story of sexual violence from a Gaza-based surgeon: “One day, at a so-called aid collection site, they received more than 10 people who had been sniped in their genitals. These are things that, according to testimonies of Israeli soldiers, they are being told to do by their superiors.”
Systematic destruction iterates this violence exponentially. As of late 2024, thousands of adults and children who lost limbs are waiting for assistive devices they cannot access. Wheelchairs have been crushed under rubble, prosthetics shattered by debris, communication devices silenced forever. People are being forced to live without the tools they need to survive.
While the question of who is disabled collapses under the weight of the weaponization of disability, a powerful inversion is taking place. Those most marked by disposability are also leading the fight for collective survival.
Large-scale projects to protect disability rights have often fallen short. Abusrour compares NGO initiatives that haven’t helped to a two-month grassroots sit-in at the Palestinian Legislative Council that forced lawmakers to pass the first disability health insurance law.
For Bonomo, the distinction between symbolic action and actual resistance is foundational. “One is an industry,” he says. “We are a movement. We are fighting for justice and equality.”
Fighting, for Bonomo, means more than going to meetings and trading symbolic gestures of solidarity. It means taking real risks.
The Disability Justice for Palestine collective has adapted its strategies for this moment. They have partnered with Doctors Against Genocide and the Gaza Charitable Forum Association for the Visually Impaired to support an urgent food distribution effort delivering meals to people in shelters and tents.
The coalition has also launched media campaigns highlighting war crimes against disabled Palestinians. Meanwhile, DJ4P has collected testimonies from disabled Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank, participated in a European Parliament meeting on their situation, and submitted urgent appeals to U.N. committees.
On Aug. 15, 2025, Abusrour joined a Palestinian disability delegation in Geneva, where she advocated for disabled Palestinians at the U.N. Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as DJ4P noted. This work centers Palestinian voices while building global networks of accountability.
But as the situation in Gaza worsens, the capacity for mutual care is collapsing. “Now it’s all about each individual and what they can do to survive,” Abusrour says. “They are in survival mode, all of them.”
For Abusrour, Bonomo and others who are doing this work, disability justice is not a matter of abstract rights or symbolic inclusion. It is a confrontation with the machinery of colonization itself.
“It’s a political issue,” Abusrour says. It’s all related, she explains. “Disability, occupation, colonization, all of it. We cannot claim people are targeted because they are disabled. They are targeted because they are Palestinian. Full stop.”
Of course, the weaponization of disability isn’t unique to Palestine, though its scale and systematicity here is unprecedented. We see echoes in how U.S. police officers disproportionately kill disabled people — particularly Black disabled people. We see it in border enforcement that targets the most vulnerable, in prison systems that simultaneously punish and create disability.
The difference in Gaza is that where other systems hide behind the rhetoric of public safety or rehabilitation, the desire to oust an entire people is transparent in its cruelty.
Abusrour is clear-eyed about what justice requires. “I believe that the only solution is ending the occupation, dismantling this settler colonialism,” she says. “No other solution will possibly bring this region justice.” This demand cuts through every feel-good campaign and diplomatically worded NGO statement.
In a world where disability is engineered as a weapon, and care is dismembered alongside real human bodies, justice must become collective, embodied and ferociously political. None of this is theoretical.
As Bonomo wrote in his open letter to disability activists, “Collectively, we have a duty to shed light on the plight of Palestinians with disabilities and demand that those responsible for crimes against them are held accountable. … Anything less is unacceptable.”
