I suspect the idea of birthing as an act of resistance is a romanticism from the west rather than a reality for Gazan women. You can’t replace a child, it doesn’t matter where the child or mother comes from. I wouldn’t be having endless children in that situation to resist anything, I would be trying to feed, educate and protect the children I do have.
There isn’t anything romantic about a reality where mothers often lose one or more children to an IDF attack. The women choosing large families are not doing so to replace children, but because there is high risk some are going to die violently before you. The reality is that you can’t protect your children if you live in Gaza or the West Bank from extrajudicial killing or arrest and imprisonment.
This isn’t the article I read- the one I read was the transcript of an interview at the start of the war with Gazan women where the female interviewer sort of kidded them about why they choose to have “so many children” when food insecurity and poverty is high and one woman said “you know only half our kids survive..”
Here is an older article that shows this isn’t new
”One puzzle, however, is why so many Gazan women – especially those that are well-educated – choose to have large families rather than pursue careers. In most countries, the birth rate usually falls hand in hand with better education and more career opportunities for women, but the pattern in Gaza fails to follow this pattern.
A study published in 2006 found that despite high educational achievement among Gazan women – all have at least nine years of schooling – and relatively low and constant infant mortality rates at around 25 per 1000 births, few chose to pursue independent careers. During the Intifada uprising that began in 1987, the research found, there was a surge in marriage rates, with many educated women prepared to marry men who were less well-educated.
“Palestinian women are not having lots of children because they don’t know about contraception, or can’t access contraception,” says Sara Randall, an anthropologist at University College London, who co-authored the 2006 investigation. “So one has to conclude that they actually want lots of children.”
Call to arms
Randall’s study, involving interviews with 16,204 Gazan women and 4900 Jordanian women for comparison, concluded that the Intifada was a key driving factor for the surge in marriage and fertility. In the Intifada years of 1989 and 1990, for example, women were 1.4 times more likely to marry than in 1980. The rate during the Intifada was even higher, at twice that in 1980, for more educated women.
“Whether the phenomenally high fertility levels in Gaza are also a more long-term response to political oppression and a perceived need to increase the numbers of Palestinians cannot be inferred from the data available, but it certainly seems to be a plausible hypothesis,” concludes Randall’s study. “In a situation where disempowerment, underemployment and marginalisation have left few opportunities for expression of identity, reproduction is one of the few liberties which remains, and also contributes to the larger goal of increasing the Palestinian people,” it says.
Pedersen says that a sense of duty to expand the population is a factor that can’t be dismissed. “There have been statements from Hamas urging women to have more children to create a larger army,” he says.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25993-the-reasons-why-gazas-population-is-so-young/.