Gaza Women Struggle to Protect Families Amid Hunger, Winter

Women in Gaza receive aid from international organizations including the UN.

Women in Gaza are ensuring their families’ survival “with nothing but courage and exhausted hands” as violence continues and essentials remain scarce, the UN’s gender equality agency warned on Tuesday.

UN Women’s Chief of Humanitarian Action, Sofia Calltorp, who returned from a visit to the enclave last week, said women repeatedly told her that “there may be a ceasefire, but the war is not over”.

“The attacks are fewer, but the killings continue,” she said.

The UN aid coordination office, OCHA, warned on Monday that hostilities continue to o be reported in various parts of the Gaza Strip, causing destruction, displacement and casualties.

UNICEF said last week that since the Hamas–Israel pause in fighting was announced on 10 October, children have been killed at a rate of two per day.

Struggling to survive

Briefing reporters in Geneva, Ms Calltorp recounted that during her trip across the entire length of the Strip — “from Jabalia in the north to Al-Mawasi in the south” — she saw that “to be a woman in Gaza today means facing hunger and fear, absorbing trauma and grief, and shielding your children from gunfire and cold nights”.

“It means being the last line of protection in a place where safety no longer exists,” she said.

Ms Calltorp noted that more than 57,000 women in Gaza now head their households and are left alone to cope in extremely harsh conditions.

“Women showed me how water soaked through their makeshift tents, leaving the children shivering throughout the night,” she said.

“This is what it means to be a woman in Gaza today — to know that winter is coming, and to know you cannot protect your children from it.”

Food still scarce

She shared the story of a woman whose home had been destroyed — “but every morning, she returns to the rubble to gather wood, burning the doors that once sheltered her family just to make breakfast for her children.”

A month and a half into the ceasefire, food remains scarce and is now four times more expensive than before the war. As an example, she said, an egg costs $2.00 in the Gaza market — “out of reach for women with no income”.

“It’s completely impossible for many of the women I met to feed their families,” Ms Calltorp stressed.

Displacement and disability

The women she met had been displaced “countless times” — in one case, as many as 35 times since the war began in October 2023.

“Every move means packing the little they have, carrying their children, their elderly parents, choosing between one unsafe place and another,” she explained.

She also highlighted a growing “crisis of women and girls newly disabled by this war”, with more than 12,000 now living with long-term war-related disabilities.

With so much stacked against them, Gaza’s women “need the ceasefire to hold, they need food, they need cash assistance, and they need winterisation supplies, health services and vital psychosocial support,” the UN Women official said. She emphasised their eagerness “to work, to lead and to rebuild Gaza with their own hands”.

“No woman or girl should have to fight this hard just to survive. We need more aid to enter Gaza systematically and safely, and we need the killings to stop,” she concluded.