The Unseen War on Gaza’s Women and Girls

Gaza’s sun beats down relentlessly; the air is thick with humidity. Sweat pours down my back, my legs. I’ve been outside for barely ten minutes, and I’m already drenched. Men and children cluster us around only to disappointedly scatter when we say, “It’s feminine products,” as we weave our way through the makeshift encampments, sidestepping the trickling open sewage.

We — a female team from my charity, the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance, INARA, and the Global Empowerment Mission, GEM — are distributing sanitary pads we managed to get our hands on. Getting aid into Gaza is harder than ever, the entire process utterly crippled by Israel’s restrictions, security challenges, and looters. 

We schlepped our cartons from tent to tent, ducking inside for privacy. Women and girls have had to resort to using strips of cloth, sacrificing an item of the little clothing they fled with, or spending exorbitant amounts of money on the open market for sanitary pads, which would mean sacrificing food, assuming they even have money to spend. Suffice it to say that when it comes to being a woman, what we are carrying is gold. 

But it is humiliating, as my friend Hanya, who works with GEM, remarks to me later. 

“I kept thinking about what these women were thinking and how degrading getting such a basic human need must have felt,” she said. “You need it as a handout, and every fiber of your being wants to refuse, but you don’t even have that privilege — because that would mean you’d end up bleeding into your own clothes.”

As I move through the crush of misery that is what existence in Gaza has been reduced to, my gaze tends to linger longer on the faces of women and girls, perhaps because I know something of the extra burden and pain they carry, the additional layers of fears and challenges they face. 

Each trip I make to Gaza with my charity INARA, more and more people talk of the increase in gender-based violence, which encompasses physical, verbal, psychological, socio-economic, domestic, and sexual forms of violence. 

But for all the talk, there is very little concrete information. Humanitarian and other organizations have no idea about the scale or scope. They are unable to carry out in-depth assessments with the bombs falling, populations constantly on the move, and their own ability to move within Gaza restricted by Israel. 

“Gaza has been such a nightmare in terms of human rights violations that it’s impossible to cover everything,” Ajith Sunghay, the Head of the UN Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said to me on a call after we had both left Gaza. “We just end up bouncing from one issue to another. On some critical ones, we’re not able to go back and do an analysis.”

My mind flashes back to stories I’ve covered in other warzones, of the little spoken about the dark underbelly of “crisis,” where the confluence of war, desperation, and displacement results in predators lurking in dark corners, sexual exploitation for aid, families forced to marry girls off too young because they cannot afford to feed or protect them, and so much more. 

I remember meeting 13-year-old Najwa in 2013 at Jordan’s Zaatari Camp for Syrian refugees. Najwa’s father was “missing,” presumed detained or killed by the Syrian regime. She was married off by her mother, who feared she would otherwise be raped if she did not have a man’s protection. I remember 14-year-old Eman, who was also wed for protection, cradling her newborn, utterly exhausted as her mother said, “Her husband promised he would wait to get her pregnant, but he didn’t.” 

Women’s rights organizations and other women-led groups in Gaza are raising two main issues: child marriage and pregnancy outside of wedlock. In the past, there were shelters for abused women and girls, for those who were pregnant and needed to flee their husbands or their families, but none of that exists anymore. 

“The shelters were destroyed by bombs. There is no government, no supportive institutions for abused women and girls, and no organizations protecting children and young girls,” a female lawyer who worked closely with one of the women’s shelters says. “As a result, it has become very easy to abuse women, girls, and even children through physical violence, rape, or forced labor without fear of repercussions.”

There are so many female-led “households” in Gaza now, women who have moved around repeatedly on their own, unable to provide physical or psychological safety for their children, their husbands dead, missing, or choosing to stay behind to protect their property or rather its rubble. These women are lionesses in their own right, but the ferocity that drives them to protect and feed their children also makes them that much more vulnerable to exploitation. 

I remember a young Syrian mother I met in Lebanon who did not want to share her name but shared her story of how she had to trade her body for a food parcel and continue to “make nice” with her rapist before she was able to move herself and her children to a different location. 

At one stop we made in the Mawasi’s tented beachfront area, mothers thrust listless babies toward my INARA team, begging, “Please, can you help?”

There are so many flies blanketing the ground in and around tents that each step sends up a black cloud. There are no proper toilets. We’re surrounded by a cacophony of imploring voices asking for food, shampoo, diapers, baby milk powder, and clean water. Children are covered in infected insect bites, there is a lice infestation, and communicable diseases are running rampant. Hunger and thirst gnaw, and parents go hungrier to feed their children one to two meals a day. 

I remember the story of Mariam I covered back in 2014, a 40-year-old Syrian mother of three who chose to set herself on fire rather than see her children continue to go hungry. 

“It’s hard; it’s hard for a mother to want to feed her children,” she had said to me then. “I chose death; I chose death rather than seeing my children die a million times in front of me,”

How many of those female faces I see in Gaza stoically hide similar overwhelming emotional tornados of helplessness, frustration, and agony? 

Earlier this year, I visited a maternity hospital in Rafah. It was already seeing or registering 80 births a day. At least half of the babies were born outside the hospital in a tent. 

“Who cuts the cord? Are there midwives?” I had asked one of the head nurses. 

“No, no. There’s usually someone around who has given birth before, and they know what to do and how to snip the cord,” she had responded. “We tie up the umbilical cord properly when they get here.”

“I got pregnant before October 7th. It’s my first; my husband and I were so excited to start a family,” one soon-to-be mother waiting in line told me that day. “This is supposed to be a happy moment, but I’m scared. I’m just scared. I’m so scared I feel paralyzed by it.”

So many people I speak to in Gaza say they are not just afraid of the bombs that might bury them but of when all that was buried within emerges and all that was silenced starts to be spoken.