GAZA, (PIC)
Between tattered tents and the hollow faces of exhausted children, the mothers of Gaza are living a humanitarian catastrophe of staggering cruelty one in which hunger, displacement, and the loss of sons, daughters, and husbands have collapsed into a single, unbearable reality. Countless women are fighting simply to survive in conditions that strip human dignity to nothing.
In a place where displacement camps sit atop the memory of demolished homes where the features of childhood are indistinguishable from the noise of hunger and fear; a reality has taken shape that exceeds what any person should be asked to endure. Mothers have lost their children and their husbands the way one loses all sense of direction on a road that no longer exists.
Israel’s war of extermination on Gaza has forced more than 90 percent of the Strip’s population into displacement, many of them uprooted multiple times. They live in overcrowded shelters or in the open air, surrounded by spreading disease, vanishing water supplies, and a near-total absence of medicine; conditions documented repeatedly by United Nations agencies and international relief organizations.
Displacement without end
Inside a small tent that shields her from neither the summer heat nor the cold of night, Widad al-Najjar sits, a mother displaced from the town of Khuzaa, east of Khan Yunis, retracing a long journey of exile that began in the first days of the war, on October 8, 2023.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Widad says her family was forced to flee more than six times, moving between different areas in search of somewhere safe, never finding stability, never finding peace of mind. “We lost our homes, our relatives, everything we owned,” she says. “Nothing remains to us but memories.”
But what weighs most heavily on this Palestinian mother is not the displacement itself. It is the agonizing, unresolved disappearance of her only son a child she was given after six daughters. She lost contact with him in the early months of the war, and since then she has been suspended between the hope of finding him alive and the dread of having lost him forever.
“All I want is to know his fate,” Widad says. “Was he martyred? Is he a prisoner? I need an answer that will give my heart rest. I cannot live without him. He is the air I breathe. Without him, I have no life. I want to be proud of him the way mothers everywhere in the world are proud of their children.”
Loss, imprisonment, hunger
In another displacement camp in Khan Yunis, Huda al-Madani lives with the grief of having lost her son Ibrahim and with the constant, grinding anxiety for her other son Ahmad, who has been held in Israeli prisons for more than two years.
Her son Ibrahim was killed during the Israeli genocide, leaving behind five children. Ahmad, meanwhile, has been unable to see the youngest of his children a boy born after his arrest, now two years and eight months old. “The child always asks about his father,” Huda says. “He wants to see him, like other children see theirs. Our hearts are shattered. We wait for any news.”
But the suffering of Gaza’s mothers does not stop at bereavement. It extends to the grinding conditions inside the displacement shelters themselves; the scarcity of food and water, the complete absence of income, the erasure of the most basic mechanisms of life.
Umm Mahmoud Baraka, a widow and mother of four, now bears alone the full weight of providing for her family after her husband was killed. “I have become both mother and father at the same time,” she says. “We are trying to stay alive in the middle of hunger and fear and the total absence of the simplest necessities.”
The displaced mothers, at the end of their testimonies, said the same thing in different words: the Palestinian mother is no longer searching for a dignified life. She is searching for the bare minimum safety, food, and the chance to shield her children from death and from an endless cycle of flight.
The numbers behind the faces
According to data documented by UN Women, approximately 38,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s war of extermination among them 22,000 women and 16,000 girls, at a rate of no fewer than 47 women and girls per day. This figure represents more than half of the total death toll recorded across the Strip.
Roughly one million women and girls have been displaced multiple times during the war. Around 790,000 face acute or catastrophic food insecurity. More than 22,000 women have lost their husbands and been made widows. And approximately 55,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women confront severe health risks as a direct consequence of the collapsed healthcare system and widespread malnutrition, figures drawn from Gaza’s Government Media Office and reports by the United Nations Population Fund.
Women bearing the weight of war
Humanitarian observers emphasize that Gaza’s crisis cannot be understood solely through casualty figures or destroyed buildings. The war has fundamentally reshaped family life, placing disproportionate burdens on women who must sustain households under catastrophic conditions.
In Gaza today, motherhood is inseparable from survival. Mothers carry the weight of hunger, displacement, and grief simultaneously, three forces converging to redefine what it means to protect a family in a territory pushed to the brink.
Their struggle reflects not only a humanitarian emergency but a profound moral indictment of a world that continues to witness suffering without delivering lasting protection or justice.
