Snapshots from Gaza: By sheer will, Palestinian women eke out a life

Wafaa Abu Irjilia never dreamed she would become a single mother.

Six months ago, she was a housewife, happy to nurture her growing family with her husband, Ahmed – her rock and “strength” – by her side.

Now she is a widow raising four children between the ages of 2 and 7 in a tent alongside her own two sisters and six other young relatives. “If I need to leave the tent,” she says, “I have to tread carefully so as not to disturb the others.”

There is little time to grieve for her husband, “the kindest and most generous person I knew,” Ms. Abu Irjilia says. Instead, focus is on daily necessities: food, water, and the safety of her children.

“It is a huge responsibility on my shoulders,” she says.

Across the Gaza Strip, Palestinian women say they have been caught in a war of survival and adaptation ever since Israel began its bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. 

Ms. Abu Irjilia is one of some 3,000 Palestinian women who have been widowed, becoming heads of household overnight, according to United Nations Women. As many as a million women and girls are estimated to have been displaced, forced to try to create a sense of home and stability in desert tents or overflowing evacuee centers where privacy is impossible and sanitation is limited. Many have been uprooted multiple times, as each refuge has become newly unsafe.

Yet amid these unimaginable burdens, the women of Gaza are somehow rising to meet challenges that only seem to get heavier by the day: lack of sanitation, single parenthood, hunger, disease. Even pregnancy has become a life-threatening struggle.

It is a will to survive and keep their families alive that keeps Palestinian women in Gaza going – even as they no longer recognize the people they have become. 

Untold strength

Strength has always been important to Wisam Hamdan. 

As a personal trainer in Khan Yunis, she helped other women achieve their own fitness and strength goals. Now she lives in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of Rafah with her family. In the process, she has gone from lifting weights at the gym to carrying jerrycans of seawater back to her family’s tent to bathe.

“The burden of this war has fallen heavily on the women in Gaza,” she says, wrapped in the same prayer clothes she has worn for months. 

Having lost weight and most of her once carefully toned muscle, Ms. Hamdan says she feels disconnected from her body. Her hands ache. Her body is fatigued. Her legs nearly drag when she walks. It’s as if she is inhabiting a body that is no longer hers. 

By sheer will and determination, she has summoned a different kind of strength, the kind that enables her to carry on. 

Still, “I yearn for the girl I used to be before the war,” she says.

Preserving dignity

Since she left her home barefoot under the threat of incoming Israeli missile strikes, Basma Hamdan has shared a room with her parents, two sisters, two brothers, and their children in an evacuee center hosting thousands.

“The war is so humiliating. When I go to the bathroom, I try to go early in the morning when there isn’t a long line,” she says.

Prior to the war, Ms. Hamdan, an aspiring teacher, had an evening routine of showering and then applying night cream and hand cream. Now “bathing is a luxury.” 

Disheveled, wearing a frayed prayer gown, Ms. Hamdan searches for soap to clean the bathroom before her aging mother uses it. The gesture is an act of love, a preservation of dignity for the woman who nurtured her. But it is also one of survival, amid dismal sanitary conditions and an outbreak of hepatitis.

Crammed in with hundreds of other displaced families, she says, “I have never felt so isolated.”

She finds refuge in taking walks by herself along the sea. “I wish I could fly away from this war,” she says. 

Expecting

Asma Abu Daqqa discovered she was pregnant just weeks before Oct. 7 and the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war. Then, she daydreamed of the new addition to her happy family as she carefully prepared lunchboxes for her four young children.

Now Ms. Abu Daqqa has found herself in a makeshift tent in the al-Mawasi area, her home destroyed, her husband injured, struggling daily to find or purchase water and limited food, and washing laundry with seawater.

“No one in my family knew that I was pregnant until very recently, not even my parents,” Ms. Abu Daqqa says while baking bread over an open fire, her eyes tearing from the smoke.

Her stomach is small compared with previous pregnancies; there is no visible bulge. Like many Palestinians in Gaza, Ms. Abu Daqqa drinks dirty water and eats small amounts of processed canned food to survive.

Without access to prenatal care, “I have never checked on my baby’s health,” she says. “I am very concerned that I might lose my baby. I feel I am doing this baby an injustice.”

Against the odds

Walaa Abu Eliyyan’s contractions started at 1 a.m. on March 2.

The Emirati hospital was a kilometer away. Her mother-in-law and husband carried her on their shoulders, stumbling between tents in the pitch-black night, somehow managing to avoid shelling, airstrikes, and stray dogs.

“Giving birth in war is nothing but danger,” she says.

The U.N. estimates there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and that more than 160 babies are delivered every day. The war has caused miscarriages to triple, while stillbirths, premature deliveries, and postpartum depression are reportedly rising, according to the World Health Organization.

But Ms. Abu Eliyyan was fortunate. 

Once at the hospital, she spent hours in labor, with only an occasional nurse on hand for assistance. In the end, she gave birth to a baby boy, Qais – as Israeli military drones buzzed above and nearby airstrikes shook the ground.

The “recovery room” was packed with evacuees. Women came and plugged phone chargers in the electrical outlet above her head while strangers walked in and out to fill jerrycans with water. 

Due to limited beds, Ms. Abu Eliyyan had to return to her tent only a few hours after delivery. There was little time to take in the joy of her newborn, no ability to hold a baby shower or cook food and share with neighbors for traditional Islamic birth celebrations. Instead, it was an immediate return to the fight for survival.

“Becoming a mother should be a time for celebration,” she says from her tent outside Rafah.

Feeding Rafah

Amira Asy, a mother of three, once owned a thriving restaurant and catering business in Khan Yunis, providing spreads for wedding banquets, funerals, and graduations. 

After an Israeli missile strike destroyed her kitchen, “the heart and soul” of her culinary creations, Ms. Asy was able to salvage utensils and some kitchenware from the rubble.

She lends her oversize pots to local residents and displaced families. And now, with the help of local organizations, she cooks again. 

Local nongovernmental organizations and charities have contracted Ms. Asy to prepare meals for hundreds of displaced families in Rafah, providing her with large supplies of flour – a rarity in the besieged strip. 

Each day this past Ramadan, rising before the break of dawn, she prepared a staggering 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of maftool, a traditional dish of small pearl-shaped hand-rolled wheat balls. At midday, she boiled them in large vats to be distributed across Rafah before the 6 p.m. sunset prayer, when Muslims break their fast.

“I want to live,” she says resolutely, “I want to recover. I want to help my family.” 

Amid a war that has taken so much, “I cannot bear the thought of standing still and not taking action.” 

Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.