The Reality of Palestinian Women After the Events of October 7 and Amid the 2023–2024 War

Introduction:

War affects women and men differently; but women and children suffer disproportionately during and after war, as women and children are often the most vulnerable and exposed groups, with women who survive these atrocities forced to live with vivid and terrifying images of war and death for the rest of their lives, and they face the arduous task of holding families together after displacement, and providing food, clothing, and shelter for their children and families amid destroyed infrastructure. This is happening in full inside Palestine, where Palestinian women have suffered the horrors of war from the Nakba of 1948 until now, whether direct suffering targeting women, or indirect suffering through the political, economic, and social effects left by the occupation, which have led to a deterioration of the humanitarian, social, economic, and security situation within the Palestinian territories, contributing significantly to the deterioration of the conditions of Palestinian women in terms of safety and security, and access to their most basic rights to essential services such as education and health, alongside the added burdens borne by women when a family member is martyred or arrested, as they become, in most cases, the sole breadwinner of the family.

Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip are suffering a tragic situation amid the continuation of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip. Since the outbreak of the war and the aggression on the Gaza Strip following Hamas's Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7, 2023, the suffering of Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip has begun to worsen, as the war has placed the whole of Palestinian society, and Palestinian women in particular, before major challenges and immense difficulties, at the security, economic, health, social, and psychological levels. The war has also led to the killing of more than 10,000 Palestinian women, and the wounding of additional numbers, as of the preparation of this report.

Security conditions and the measures of the Israeli occupation have always constituted major and immense challenges for Palestinian women, especially since they continue to make further sacrifices, whether at the level of political and national struggle, or at the level of societal struggle, amid the continuation of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

In this paper we will shed light on the reality of Palestinian women amid the Israeli war across the Palestinian territories in general, and in the Gaza Strip in particular, as the war on Gaza and the continuous incursions in the West Bank have cast serious repercussions on the reality of Palestinian women, at the security, economic, health, livelihood, and psychological levels.

Prepared by: Dr. Mansour Abu Kareem