Earlier studies show how colonial regimes target colonized children’s lives, bodies and futures as part of the colonizer’s logics of elimination (Wolf 2006), genocide (Smith 2010) and as an articulation of sovereignty (Mbembe 2003). Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) argues that Palestinian children are political capital in the state’s hands. She examines the way the settler colonial state uses children, invokes violence to govern their childhood, and reproduces sovereignty marking children’s bodies and lives as unchilded others. Unchilding for Shalhoub-Kevorkian is an Israeli colonial machinery of dispossession that intentionally targets children, maintains children in a constant state of mundane dismemberment and eviction from humanity and childhood, in their homes, schools and neighborhoods. Responding to the colonial machinery of elimination, dispossession and killing of colonized children, this study will focus on Palestinian fathers’ encounters when dealing with unchilding of their sons and daughter by looking into the individual, familial and collective psycho-social modes of dealing, coping, resistance and growth. Looking at the workings of power that affects, frames and re-constructs fatherhood and childhood under an ongoing politically violent context, and based on 30 interviews with Jerusalemite fathers, this presentation will examine fathers’ experiences of unfathering (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019) and handcuffing (Otman, in press), which hinders their ability to protect their children. My analysis of the interviews reveals that although fathers experience fear, anxiety and loss in their everydayness, fathers’ love, care and resistance motivate them to give new meanings and open new spaces of protection, to challenge the Israeli colonial machinery of dispossession. By standing against state power and its violence, colonized fathers insist on their fatherhood against colonial unfathering, maintain their right to father, build new context-sensitive modes of protection, and search for spaces of life under ongoing machinery of trauma and loss. By engendering the analyses, and offering an indigenous and feminist reading to the voices of Palestinian fathers against unchilding, I argue that in contexts of structural oppression and danger, scholars need to challenge the mainstream concepts of protection and “good fatherhood” and open these concepts up to reveal contextual complexities, and the various and innovative modes of fatherhood. By challenging state power and its violences, fathers’ narrations offer us new knowledge regarding their constant struggle against unchilding and unfathering, and the plurality of modes of resistance and survival in life and after death.