The Immeasurable Endurance of the Women of Gaza

Gaza-Women possess invaluable strength – a resilience based on survival, not choice – and the women of Gaza must have been especially strong. Since the start of the Israeli genocide in October 2023, Israel has endured one of the most serious humanitarian crises in modern history.

The figures are heartbreaking: more than 12,400 Palestinian women have been killed in Gaza over the past two and a half years, alongside more than 18,500 children. These deaths are more than just statistics: they represent shattered lives, torn families apart, and an entire community living in the shadow of destruction. Yet even in the face of such brutality, Gaza’s women persist. They carry their communities, serving as pillars of endurance amid the ruins of a society that has been all but erased.

Here, women became both the primary caregivers and providers, responsible for securing food, water, and shelter, treating the injured, and providing for their families in the absence of husbands, fathers, and sons. They are continually forced to make heartbreaking decisions as medical systems collapse and access to care becomes severely limited. Families are struggling to get care for their injured or chronically ill children amid overwhelmed hospitals and critical shortages. Persistent violence, restricted access to emergency services and lack of equipment for the civil protection team have, in some cases, prevented families from reaching or helping their loved ones in time.

But in crowded displacement camps, in shelters exposed to the elements, and in makeshift homes that barely offer protection, they persist – not by choice, but because there is no alternative. They are mothers who comfort their children by amputating them without anesthesia, daughters who bury their parents, and wives who carry the unbearable grief of losing their husbands in a single airstrike. Their suffering is both physical and psychological, but they continue to care for the next generation, even as their own bodies give in to exhaustion.

Women in Gaza queue for hours for water while carrying infants. They are searching hospitals for missing sons. They remember the names of their martyrs and pray for them so that their children are not reduced to mere numbers. They continue to teach their remaining children how to read, how to pray and how to hope, even when the future seems anonymous in Gaza.

Hospitals and shelters have become places where motherhood is repeatedly tested. Women give birth without painkillers, anesthesia or adequate medical care, sometimes in hospitals or in crowded classrooms turned into shelters. Newborns arrive into a world of malnutrition and starvation, contaminated water and incessant bombing. For many women, fear does not end with childbirth but only begins.

Displacement further deprived women of stability, privacy and security. Women bear the responsibility for keeping children safe when tents collapse in winter rains or summer heat, when sanitation facilities break down, and when diseases spread. In tents and shelters, basic actions – bathing, menstruating, breastfeeding – have become daily struggles. Girls grow up too quickly and learn fear before they learn freedom.

The psychological toll is staggering. Women in Gaza are expected to carry the weight of grief, trauma and responsibilities, while maintaining some semblance of normalcy for their children. They endure the emotional pain of burying their loved ones in silence so that others can mourn publicly. And yet they persist, not out of innate resilience, but because collapse is not an option. To hesitate is to risk the complete erasure of a people and a culture.

Many Gazan women played several roles at once and became both parents overnight. Others lost entire families. Some, like pediatrician Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, survived the unimaginable – losing nine children and her husband in a single airstrike – while continuing their commitment to their work as doctors.

Amal Ammar, the wife of journalist Yahya Sobeih, killed by the Israeli occupation, is now raising her children alone. Baraa, Kennan and Sanaa are growing up every day, missing their father, Yahya. Like her, the wives of journalists Ismail Al-Ghoul, Anas Al-Sharif and Roshdi Sarraj were forced into celibacy by targeted killings – a reality shared by countless other women whose lives were irreversibly altered by the genocide.