UN Women’s Chief of
Humanitarian Action Sofia Calltorp, who just returned from a
visit to the enclave last week, said that women there
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 UN aid
coordination office, OCHA, warned
on Monday that hostilities continued to be reported in
various parts of the Gaza Strip, causing destruction,
displacement and casualties.
UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said last week
that since the Hamas-Israel pause in fighting was announced
on 10 October, children were being killed in attacks in the
enclave at a rate of two a day.
Struggling to
survive
Briefing reporters in Geneva Ms. Calltorp
recounted that during her trip which spanned 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
insisted.
Ms. Calltorp said that more than 57,000
women in Gaza now head their households and are left alone
to struggle in supremely harsh conditions.
Advertisement – scroll to continue reading
“Women
showed me how water soaked through their makeshift tents,
leaving the children shivering throughout the night,” she
explained.
“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
The senior official told the story of a woman
she met 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 is still scarce and four times more
expensive than before the war – as an example, an egg
costs $2.00 on the market in Gaza – which is “out of
reach for women with no income”, she said.
“It’s
completely impossible for many of the women that I met to
feed their families,” Ms. Calltorp
insisted.
Displacement and disability
The
women whom she talked to had been displaced “countless
times”, she said – as many as 35 times since the start
of the war in October 2023 in one case.
“Every move
means packing the little they have, carrying their children,
their elderly parents, choosing between one unsafe place and
another,” Ms. Calltorp explained.
She also mentioned
the “crisis of women and girls newly disabled by this
war”, with over 12,000 of them living with long-term
war-related disabilities.
With so much stacked up
against them and their families, Gaza’s women “need the
cease-fire to hold, they need food, they need cash
assistance and they need winterization supplies, health
services and vital psychosocial support,” the UN Women
official said. She stressed how eager they were “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 into
Gaza systematically and safely, and we need the killings to
stop,” she
concluded.
