Being gay in Palestine means navigating overlapping layers of legal threat, community pressure, and institutional hostility that differ sharply between Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, sex between men is a felony carrying up to ten years in prison under a British Mandate-era statute still on the books. In the West Bank, no law explicitly criminalizes it, but police have banned LGBTQ organizations and use vague public morality provisions to detain people who don’t conform. For most LGBTQ Palestinians, though, the sharpest danger comes from family and community: honor-based violence, forced marriage, and exile that no statute needs to authorize.
The Law in the West Bank
Criminal law in the West Bank derives primarily from the Jordanian Penal Code of 1960, adopted before the Israeli occupation and still governing criminal matters for Palestinian residents. The code contains no provision that explicitly criminalizes consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex. That silence has sometimes been described as de facto legality, but the description overstates the protection it offers.
The same code includes broad public morality provisions that authorities routinely use against LGBTQ people. Article 320 punishes anyone who commits an “indecent act” in public with up to six months in prison. Article 319 targets distributing material deemed obscene or “tending to corrupt morals.” These vague categories give police and prosecutors wide latitude against people whose behavior or expression falls outside social norms, even when no sex-specific statute applies. Human rights researchers have found that public indecency laws in the West Bank “are often used to persecute individuals that do not conform to established gender binary, social norms, and attitudes.”1ecoi.net. Palestine: Treatment of Sexual Minorities by Society and Authorities, Including Legislation, State Protection, and Support Services (2016-October 2018) – Section: 1. Legislation
The practical effect: a gay man in the West Bank is unlikely to be charged specifically for having sex with another man, but he is at real risk of arrest and detention under morality provisions that require no proof of sexual conduct and set no clear standard for what qualifies as “indecent.”
Visibility carries its own risk. In August 2019, Palestinian Authority police publicly banned all activities organized by Al Qaws, the most prominent grassroots organization advocating for sexual and gender diversity in Palestinian society. A police spokesman called the group’s events “detrimental to the values and ideals of Palestinian society” and instructed officers to prevent any future gatherings. Al Qaws rejected the ban, calling it an attempt to “create an atmosphere of prosecution and intimidation,” and continues to operate, but the directive made clear that any public-facing LGBTQ work in PA-controlled areas invites police interference.
The Law in Gaza
Gaza operates under a more explicitly punitive framework. The British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance No. 74 of 1936 remains in force and directly criminalizes sex between men. Section 152(2) makes it a felony for any person who “has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature” or who “permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature.” Conviction carries up to ten years in prison. Attempting the same acts carries up to seven years under Section 154.2The Palestine Gazette. Criminal Code Ordinance 1936
This colonial-era statute was never repealed. Neither the Palestinian Authority during its earlier administration of Gaza nor Hamas after it took control in 2007 moved to change it. In practice, Hamas enforces well beyond what the 1936 code requires. Internal Hamas documents recovered by Israeli forces in a Gaza tunnel revealed that the organization executed one of its own senior officials, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, in 2016 after he was believed to be gay. Hamas tortured him before the execution and continued to target other members suspected of homosexuality. Testimonies from gay Palestinians who escaped Gaza describe being arrested, suspended from ceilings, beaten, and interrogated for days.
The military conflict in Gaza since late 2023 has made an already dire situation worse. What little informal support existed has been destroyed by displacement and bombardment. Gender-affirming healthcare, previously available in limited form for intersex individuals, is now inaccessible. LGBTQ Gazans face the same existential dangers as every other civilian, with the added burden that their identity makes seeking help from neighbors, shelters, or community leaders more dangerous still.
Family and Community Violence
For most LGBTQ Palestinians, the criminal code is not the primary threat. Palestinian society places heavy weight on collective family honor, and a person’s sexual orientation is rarely treated as private. When someone is discovered or suspected to be gay, the consequences fall on the entire household. Families that fear reputational damage may respond with forced marriage, physical abuse, economic cutoff, or expulsion.
At the extreme end, this dynamic produces killings. In October 2022, Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was stabbed to death and beheaded in Hebron. He had fled to Israel two years earlier after years of physical abuse by his family, including being shot at by a relative. Despite holding a temporary residency permit in Israel, he was found murdered in his hometown. A suspect was arrested at the scene and charged with premeditated murder; the case remained unresolved as of 2024, with a psychiatric evaluation described as “inconclusive.”
In April 2023, an armed resistance group in Nablus publicly executed a young man named Zuhair al-Ghaleeth. His killing was tied to allegations that he had been coerced into serving as an informant for Israeli intelligence after being blackmailed over his sexual orientation.
Documented anti-gay killings are described by activists as rare, with the caveat that some incidents are disguised as accidents or attributed to other motives. The cases that surface publicly tend to involve men. Very little public reporting exists on violence against lesbian or bisexual Palestinian women, though organizations working in the region say these women face equally severe family pressure and are more likely to be subjected to forced marriage as a corrective measure.
The Collaboration Trap
One dynamic facing LGBTQ Palestinians has no clear parallel elsewhere. Israeli intelligence services have systematically exploited the vulnerability of gay Palestinians to recruit informants. The mechanism is straightforward: if an officer discovers or suspects someone’s sexual orientation, that knowledge becomes leverage, backed by the threat of exposure to family and community.
Documented cases follow the same pattern. In one incident reported in 2023, a Palestinian man was stopped at a checkpoint, and a soldier noticed a dating app on his phone. He and his partner were held for five hours while an official scrolled through his private messages and photos, then asked him to work as a collaborator in exchange for payment and a promise not to arrest him. In forced confessions published by armed groups, at least two Palestinians executed for alleged collaboration described being approached through dating platforms by people connected to Israeli intelligence.
The result is a feedback loop. Being gay makes a person vulnerable to Israeli recruitment. Being recruited, or even suspected of it, makes a person a target for execution by Palestinian armed groups. And the mere existence of this pattern makes LGBTQ Palestinians objects of suspicion in their own communities, whether or not they have ever had contact with intelligence services. The Arabic term for this coercion is isqat, meaning “the fall,” and the label functions as a death sentence in communities where resistance to occupation is a core identity.
Digital Exposure and Blackmail
Dating apps and social media create specific dangers that go beyond ordinary privacy concerns. PA preventive security forces have maintained files on gay Palestinians and used the information to isolate them. Hamas security forces in Gaza monitor communications. Israeli intelligence monitors Arabic-language keywords tied to sexual orientation when surveilling Palestinian communications.
Private blackmail is endemic. People who discover someone’s orientation through dating apps or social media may extort money, coerce sexual acts, or expose the person to their family. Because no legal protections exist and no mechanism allows a victim to report blackmail without revealing the underlying orientation, there is no safe place to seek help. The tools that might allow LGBTQ Palestinians to find community also serve as the primary mechanism for their identification and persecution.
Transgender Palestinians
Transgender Palestinians face every danger that gay and bisexual Palestinians face, plus a layer of legal invisibility. Palestinian law does not permit individuals to change their legal gender marker or name on official identification documents.3ILGA World Database. Legal Gender Recognition There is no administrative process, no judicial pathway, and no medical criteria that would allow it. A transgender person’s official identity will always reflect the sex assigned at birth.
Gender-affirming medical care is effectively nonexistent in both territories. In Gaza before the current conflict, limited surgical services were available only for intersex individuals, not for transgender people. Those services are gone. In the West Bank, movement restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation prevent most Palestinians from accessing healthcare facilities in Israel, where gender-affirming care is available. Transgender Palestinians cannot medically transition, cannot change their documents, and cannot live openly without constant risk of exposure through the mismatch between their presentation and their legal identity.
What Limited Help Exists
The options available to an LGBTQ Palestinian in crisis are narrow. Al Qaws operates a support line called Al Khat, which offers counseling and peer support by phone and online chat. It is the most established resource in the territories, but it operates under the shadow of the 2019 ban and cannot offer physical protection.
Fleeing to Israel, the most geographically accessible option, offers precarious protection at best. An Israeli court ruled for the first time that LGBTQ Palestinians have the procedural right to file asylum applications, rejecting the state’s argument that the 1951 Refugee Convention doesn’t apply to Palestinians covered by UNRWA. Having the right to apply and actually receiving protection are different things. According to one humanitarian assessment, roughly 99 percent of asylum requests in Israel are denied or never processed. Those who do receive temporary permits face severe barriers to healthcare, housing, and employment. Several LGBTQ Palestinians who fled to Israel have ended up in at-risk youth shelters with no long-term status, including Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh, who was murdered after returning to the West Bank.
Some LGBTQ Palestinians have reached Turkey, Europe, or North America as refugees, but the path is long, dangerous, and requires resources most people do not have. No established underground network exists, and community organizations lack the capacity to facilitate evacuations. For most, the realistic choice is not between Palestine and safety abroad, but between secrecy and exposure.
What the Law Does Not Protect
No law in either the West Bank or Gaza prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. There are no hate crime statutes that would enhance penalties for anti-LGBTQ violence. No form of same-sex partnership or marriage is legally recognized. The Palestinian Basic Law, which functions as a temporary constitution, guarantees equality “without distinction based upon race, sex, color, religion, political views or disability.” Sexual orientation and gender identity are not on that list.4Constitute. Palestine 2003 (rev. 2005) Constitution
A person fired from a job, evicted from housing, or denied medical care because of their orientation has no legal claim to make and no authority to appeal to. Violence motivated by anti-LGBTQ hatred is prosecuted, if at all, as ordinary assault or murder, with no recognition of the identity-based motive. Researchers who have examined the legal landscape confirm the complete absence of any protective framework.5ecoi.net. Palestine: Treatment of Sexual Minorities by Society and Authorities, Including Legislation, State Protection, and Support Services (2016-October 2018) In Gaza, the legal system actively punishes LGBTQ people. In the West Bank, it looks the other way while others do.