UN WomenHumanitarian chief Sofia Calltorp, who just returned from a visit to the enclave last week, said the women repeatedly told her “there may be a ceasefire, but the war is not over.”
“The attacks are fewer, but the killings continue,” she said.
The United Nations aid coordination office, OCHAwarned on Monday that hostilities continued to be reported in various parts of the Gaza Strip, causing destruction, displacement and casualties.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said last week that since the announcement of the pause in fighting between Hamas and Israel on October 10, children were being killed in attacks in the enclave at a rate of two per day.
Struggling to survive
At a press conference in Geneva, Ms. Calltorp said that during her journey that covered the length of the Gaza Strip “from Jabalia in the north to Al-Mawasi in the south,” she found that “being a woman in Gaza today means facing hunger and fear, absorbing trauma and grief, and protecting your children from gunfire and cold nights.”
“It means being the last line of protection in a place where security no longer exists,” she insisted.
Ms Calltorp said more than 57,000 women in Gaza are now heads of households and are left to struggle alone in extremely difficult conditions.
“The women showed me how water entered their makeshift tents, leaving the children shivering all night,” she said.
“This is what it means to be a woman in Gaza today, knowing that winter is coming and knowing that you cannot protect your children from it. »
Food remains scarce
The senior official told the story of a woman she met whose home was destroyed – “but every morning she returns to the rubble to collect wood, burning down the doors that once sheltered her family just to make her children breakfast.”
A month and a half after the start of the ceasefire, food is still scarce and four times more expensive than before the war – for example, an egg costs $2 in the Gaza market – which is “out of reach for women without income”, she said.
“It is completely impossible for many of the women I met to feed their families,” Ms. Calltorp insisted.
Travel and disability
The women she spoke with have been displaced “countless times,” she said – up to 35 times since the war began in October 2023 in one case.
“Every move means packing up what little they have, carrying their children, their elderly parents, choosing between one dangerous place and another,” Ms. Calltorp said.
She also spoke of the “crisis of women and girls newly disabled by this war”, with more than 12,000 of them living with long-term war-related disabilities.
With so much weighing against them and their families, Gaza’s women “need the ceasefire to hold on, they need food, they need cash assistance and they need winter supplies, health services and vital psychosocial support,” the UN Women official said. She emphasized how eager they were “to work, rule and rebuild Gaza with their own hands.”
“No woman or girl should have to fight so hard just to survive. We need more help to systematically and safely enter Gaza, and we need the killings to stop,” she concluded.
We acknowledge The European Times for the information.