‘I have forgotten what it means to be a woman in this war,” 34-year-old Nada Abdelsalam told a journalist earlier this year. “Women in Gaza have borne the brunt of this war. Our burdens have multiplied, and our sense of privacy has vanished.”
Abdelsalam was forced to flee from the Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza due to relentless Israeli bombing of civilian areas — she is only one of many women suffering immeasurably.
What has left me perplexed, is that while we have often been subjected to the boisterous cries of Western feminists speaking up on everything from climate change to why the Barbie movie didn’t win an Oscar, the genocide being perpetrated against the women of Gaza has seemingly left them mute. Has the fact that Israel is the perpetrator played a part in their deafening silence and incorrigible double standards?
The World Health Organization has recognised the impact of Israel’s onslaught against women, citing that the bombardments, damaged or non-functioning health facilities, massive levels of displacement, collapsing water and electricity supplies as well as Israel’s severe restrictions on access to food and medicines, are severely disrupting maternal, newborn, and child health services.
There are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day. These women are unable to access the emergency obstetric services they need to give birth safely and care for their newborns.
Mercè Rocaspana, a Médecins Sans Frontières emergency unit health adviser, agrees: “In contexts like Gaza, where the health system has been decimated and collapsed, late access to care is posing a health risk to pregnant women and their children.”
Malnutrition
“Every day, we see women and children coming into our clinic suffering from acute malnutrition,” said Dr Maram, the lead physician for Project Hope. The nonprofit organisation said 21% of pregnant women treated in the Deir al-Balah clinic in the three weeks to 24 February were suffering from malnutrition, as were one in 10 of the children seen by its doctors there.
Only a trickle of aid is reaching Gaza — over the past couple of months, Israel has allowed fewer than 100 trucks a day to enter. The UN has said it is far short of the estimated 500 trucks needed each day to meet people’s basic needs.
Earlier this year, United Nations Women (UNW) launched its latest Gender Alert on Gaza. In it, an investigative-based gender analysis of the impact of the war in Gaza on vital services essential to women’s and girls’ health, safety and dignity, the facts are highlighted.
Long before 7 October, access to safe, potable water was already limited in Gaza as a result of decades of Israeli occupation. Today, Gaza’s water supply is at only 7% of its pre-7 October levels.
UNW estimates that 1.1 million women and girls do not have access to sufficient and safe water to meet their drinking and domestic needs — critical for breastfeeding mothers and menstrual hygiene which is integral to women’s health, dignity, and privacy.
According to the UN Population Fund, there are more than 690,000 menstruating women and adolescent girls in Gaza, all of whom are facing limited access to menstrual hygiene products.
The killing of women
In addition, based on estimates from Gaza’s Health Ministry and the United Nations Population Fund, more than 10,000 women have been killed by Israel in Gaza over the past year, more than 19,000 have been injured, 3,000 have become widows and heads of households, and an estimated 37 mothers are killed a day by Israel.
Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said that there is credible evidence of sexual assault being used as a weapon against Palestinian women and girls in Israeli detention, including rape.
Besides the absolute grotesqueness of these statistics, which confer an obvious targeting of women by Israel, the long-term psychological effects on thousands of children who will grow up without their mothers are unimaginable.
Today, Palestinian women are living through horrors that fundamentally challenge the core values of feminism. Mothers are burying their children with bare hands; families are grieving for their lost homes; women and children face malnutrition and countless communicable diseases — all under the relentless rain of Israeli bombs.
Under these circumstances, silence is not a neutral stance. Silence today is a passive endorsement of Israel’s systematic genocide — of which the majority of self-proclaimed feminists are guilty. DM