On 8 March, the reality of Palestinian women cannot be separated from their tireless resistance to colonial violence and ongoing genocide — which demolishes their homes, threatens their land and throws them in prison cells. Women also carry most of the burden of caring for a grieving community.
For nearly a hundred years, Palestinian women have been at the heart of the struggle against Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid regime in various fields, making them direct targets. Israel’s leaders have always considered Palestinian women a "demographic threat" to its colonial project. For example, former Israeli Minister Ayelet Shaked directly called for the targeting and killing of Palestinian women, especially the mothers of martyrs, describing them as "raising little snakes."
For two years of genocide, Israel killed on average seven women every two hours, including two mothers. The number of Palestinian women and girls killed by Israel in Gaza is stated to be over 28,000 with over 78,000 women and girls injured.
As the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in its shocking report of March 2025, Israel’s systematic destruction of reproductive and sexuality healthcare facilities and denial of basic humanitarian needs have caused “physical and mental harm and suffering to [Palestinian] women and girls that will have irreversible long-term effects on the mental health and the physical reproductive and fertility prospects of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.” These acts, the Commission said, “amount to crimes against humanity and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.”
Every day, dozens of Palestinian women are forced to give birth under shelling and the sound of gunfire, without any medical care during or after childbirth. Israel’s occupation has forced thousands of pregnant women to constantly move under the immediate threat of death, many of whom have miscarried as a result of these conditions. The suffering of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women has been compounded by direct injuries from the bombing. They are also under risk of contracting multiple diseases as a result of genocidal Israel preventing the delivery of aid containing essential health supplies to the Gaza Strip. Even before the beginning of Israel’s genocide, the prolonged criminal siege imposed by Israel for more than 17 years exacerbated the difficult living conditions for Palestinian women in Gaza.
As apartheid Israel escalates ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem — Palestinian women stand at the heart of communities facing and resisting continued attacks by Israeli occupation forces and settlers, particularly in areas where land is essential for survival.
In Israeli prisons, Israel imposes an even more complex reality on female Palestinian prisoners in general. Apartheid Israel arrests dozens of women from the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and an unknown number from Gaza. These women are subjected to the most heinous forms of assault and psychological, physical, and sexual torture. Israel not only subjects them to daily oppression and violations, depriving them of the most basic human rights and daily health needs, but also forces them to face pain without any healthcare. In just one instance, the Israeli authorities forced prisoner Tahani Abu Samhan to give birth without any medical support, for her or her newborn.
Israel’s
violence does not affect Palestinian women alone; its impact extends
to women across West Asia and North Africa. As Israel’s wars of
aggression against the peoples of the region expand from Lebanon to
Syria and from Yemen to Iran, women across the region confront the human
cost of repeated wars and displacement, while sustaining the struggle
for liberation and dignity.
In waging a ruthless, criminal war
of aggression against the people of Iran, the Israel-US genocidal axis
is escalating its attempt to impose a might-makes-right order that
threatens humanity at large. Given Israel’s unprecedented status as the
world’s most rogue state, due to its livestreamed genocide in Gaza, this
war must be seen in the context of the desperate effort to rehabilitate
Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide by the
colonial West, led by the US self-appointed emperor.
The massacre of at least 165 Iranian schoolgirls and their teachers, largely ignored or sanitized by the genocidal western media and its typical racism and dehumanization towards people of color, exposes the real objectives of this aggression by two rogue nuclear powers. Israel, supported by the Trump regime, wants to divide Iran and destroy its people’s cohesion and resilience, as has been its agenda in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, among other states that it has targeted in the region. Women are often at the forefront of confronting the aftermath.
Palestine is a feminist cause. In honor of the suffering, sacrifices, and heroic resistance and sumud of Palestinian women, we will continue to escalate pressure against genocidal Israel, including Israeli and complicit companies and institutions.
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