There has been substantial comparative analysis of the Ukraine and Gaza wars and criticism of the Western media’s portrayal of Ukrainians compared with Palestinians (Al-Najjar and Zaid, 2025; Ghani, 2025; Protect Journalists, 2023). However, there is limited gender analysis which places Palestinian women’s media representation in direct comparison with that of Ukrainian and Israeli women. The following research begins to close this gap by examining how the Western media’s coverage of contemporary war is not only shaped by gender but also by its intersection with race and ethnicity. This essay argues that Palestinian women are more likely to be undifferentiated, dehumanised, or completely erased than Ukrainian and Israeli women. The discursive choices of media outlets have been identified through two analytical approaches: Michelle Lazar’s (2007) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s (2010) framework of the “politics of invisibility”. Before turning to these frameworks, however, it is first necessary to provide a brief contextual overview of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and to define key terms.

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On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, eight years after the annexation of Crimea (Britannica, 2026). The United States (U.S.) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) pledged solidarity with Ukraine and responded with a raft of sanctions against Moscow, as well as increasing defence, economic, and humanitarian assistance for Kyiv (Council on Foreign Relations, 2023). Since the 2022 invasion, more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians and approximately 500,000 Russian soldiers have been killed (Statista, 2026a; Statista, 2026b; BBC, 2026).

The current Gaza war began on 7 October 2023 when approximately 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 hostages were taken by Hamas (British Red Cross, n.d.). This essay does not have the scope to analyse the significant and complex history between Israel and Palestine before this date, described by Radiatie et al. as “one of the most protracted political disputes in the history of world civilisation” (2025: 2). As such, this essay focuses on the Israeli government’s actions after October 7, including the bombardment of Gaza described as a genocide by the United Nations (2025). The total number of Palestinians killed has reached more than 73,000, with approximately 173,400 others wounded (Al Jazeera, 2026).

Having outlined the context of both wars, the essay now turns to its key terms: feminist International Relations (IR), gender, and the Western media. Feminist IR has long challenged the realist notion that the nation-state is the central actor in international relations, critiquing the exclusion, or complete absence, of women from traditional IR theory and practice (Smith, 2018). Gender is central to this investigation and is understood as a means of structuring power and social relations along masculine and feminine lines (Cohn, 2013). The empirical analysis focuses on two news outlets, which this essay refers to as the Western media: The New York Times (nytimes.com) and the Guardian (theguardian.com). They were chosen for their prominence and comparable archival access, although neither can represent the Western media as a whole, particularly given the fragmented nature of the 21st century media landscape (Groseclose and Milyo, 2005; Wells, 2004). Accordingly, references to media, mainstream media, or Western media throughout this essay denote these two outlets specifically. The analysis examines how these two outlets may reflect wider patterns in Western media discourse on war and women, rather than making generalised claims about Western media as a whole.

To examine how the mainstream media frames war, and how such representations marginalise the lives of women, particularly Palestinian women, this essay will adopt a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Feminist CDA or FCDA). FCDA is a subcategory of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which analyses “how discourse constructs, maintains, and potentially challenges social inequalities within various social contexts” (McLeod, 2024: 6). CDA, however, does not sufficiently centre gender and patriarchy in its analysis (Jamshaid and Saeed, 2026). FCDA addresses this gap by examining how discursive constructions reproduce, legitimise, and sustain gendered power relations. As Lazar defines it, FCDA investigates “the complex and diverse ways by which gender ideologies that entrench power asymmetries become ‘common sense’ in particular communities and discourse contexts, and how they may be challenged” (2017: 372). This makes FCDA a particularly valuable tool for examining the media coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, allowing analysis not only of the language and narratives used, but also of how they sustain gendered social arrangements (Lazar, 2007).

However, Lazar does note that mechanisms of power are not universal; rather, they are “produced and experienced in different ways for and by different groups of women” (2007: 147). Postcolonial feminist scholars such as Mohanty make a similar point, arguing that women should not be universalised as a “singular group on the basis of a shared oppression” (2003: 22). Therefore, this essay draws on postcolonial feminist scholarship and makes intersectionality central to its approach, specifically how race and ethnicity shape the Western media’s coverage of women in contemporary war. The marginalisation of Palestinian women is rooted in discursive choices that reflect Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s framework of the “politics of invisibility”. She describes this as a process linking the private lives of Palestinian women to the broader “global power game”, identifying militarisation and occupation as mechanisms by which their voices are silenced and their suffering rendered unrecognised (2010: 3).

To ensure that the scope of the study remained manageable and methodologically transparent, a set of selection parameters was established. For both the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza conflicts, time frames were deliberately selected to coincide with the periods when media coverage of women was most visible: 1 April – 30 April 2022 for the Russia-Ukraine war, 1 November – 30 November 2023 for the Israel-Gaza war, both periods coinciding with widely reported war crimes (Dawson, 2022; Al Jazeera, 2023), to which women are disproportionately vulnerable (OHCHR, n.d.). The search terms combined conflict-specific keywords with gender relevant terms, rather than retrieving all coverage and filtering the results afterwards. The following search terms were used: Ukraine, Russia, war, women, woman; and Israel, Gaza, war, women, woman.

Additionally, the sample was restricted to news, magazine, or feature articles reporting from within the conflict-affected regions (i.e. Russia and Ukraine; Israel and Gaza). Opinion pieces, live updates, daily briefings, or wire-service reprints were excluded in order to ensure the analysis reflected each outlet’s own editorial voice. The final sample is displayed in Table 1.

Before examining the discursive choices of the New York Times and the Guardian across the Israel-Gaza data set, it is important to briefly note the substantial criticism by journalists, academics, and media monitoring organisations........

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