Killing of 9,000 women in Gaza spurs calls for Israel’s ouster from UN women’s body

By Maryam Qarehgozlou

“She was injured very badly, I held her in my arms in the car, I was stroking her face and trying to assure her ‘we are nearly there [hospital]’,” a Palestinian teen narrated the story of her mother, who was killed in an Israeli bombing in February in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

A heartbreaking photo of Shehab Omar Abu al-Hanud, 19, clinging to the shrouded body of his mother, Ghada, on a hospital bed in Rafah, was appropriately titled “The Last Farewell.”

Ghada was killed in an Israeli airstrike after a big wardrobe fell on her, when she, her husband and their two children were trying to rush out of a shelter they were staying in the border city under siege.

“My father found her under the wardrobe that had fallen on her, we cleared the debris on top of her and kept calling her name, begging her to talk to us, but she wasn’t able to respond,” Shehab recalled in conversation with journalists, struggling to hold back his copious tears.

When they arrived at the hospital teeming with injured people and finally found a doctor, he had one cursory look at her and told them there was no hope and that she should be moved to the tent where the bodies of the deceased are kept, a substitute for the mortuary.

“But we saw she was still breathing, she was moving… we talked to the doctor, argued with him,” he said, angry and exasperated.

Ghada managed to stay alive for a further 40 minutes when the doctor brought her back to the treatment tent and put her on intravenous fluids and oxygen.

“She was everything to me,” Shehab said. “She was my mother and my sister and my friend. Life without her has no meaning. I have a right to have a mother … a right to live with my mother.”

“She really wanted to talk to us, but she couldn’t … seconds before her soul left her, a tear rolled down her face… she seemed to smile at us, and then she left, her soul went to God’s mercy.”

‘A war on women’

The Israeli regime’s genocidal war on Gaza, now into its sixth month, has already claimed more than 31,700 lives in Gaza, including at least 9,000 women. Many are still unaccounted for.

The UN Women said earlier this month that the number is “likely an underestimate” because many more women are presumed dead under the rubble.

It also estimated that an average of 63 women is getting killed in the blockaded, war-ravaged territory every day, with 37 of them being mothers, leaving their children “with diminished protection.”

The Last Farewell: Palestinians bid adieu to their loved ones with tears and pain

A father shouldering the coffin of his young son. A mother gazing at the lifeless body of her daughter. A small boy wrapping his arms around his slain father. These are the scenes on the streets of Gaza today.

With Israel using starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3 million population of Gaza, 4 in 5 women (84 percent) in Gaza told UN Women that at least one of their family members had to skip meals to feed their children.

“In 95 percent of those cases, mothers are the ones going without food, skipping at least one meal to feed their children,” with some mothers scavenging for food under rubble or in dumpsters, it added.

Another report published in mid-January revealed that nearly one million women in Gaza are displaced, and at least 3,000 women have become widows and new heads of households, following their male partner’s death.

The facts mentioned above, the report said, are why the war on Gaza is also “a war on women.”

‘Shocking reports’

A group of UN experts in a statement last month expressed alarm over human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls in both the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

The experts said reports of “deliberate targeting” and “extrajudicial killing” of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing in Gaza was “shocking.”

In January, Palestinian woman Hala Khreis, was “executed” by an Israeli sniper in northern Gaza, even though a verified and widely circulated video showed her holding the hand of her small grandson who was waving a white flag and was walking along an evacuation route which had been declared safe.

As per the rules of armed conflict enshrined in the Geneva Convention, a white flag “is a flag of truce” for people, both civilians and combatants, who seek protection or surrender during the war.

Khreis’ children said an Israeli sniper shot their aged mother in “cold blood” despite her waving a white flag and walking along an evacuation route that had been declared “safe”  by the occupying forces.

Khreis isn’t the only one though. According to UN experts, an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza.

“There are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown.”

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The world is still waiting for news of Hind, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza who begged for help in a tragic call.

Sexual violence

The UN experts also expressed “serious concern” about the arbitrary detention of hundreds of Palestinian women and girls, including human rights defenders, journalists and humanitarian workers, in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since October 7.

“Many have reportedly been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, and severely beaten. On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in the rain and cold, without food,” they noted in a statement.

According to these experts, who were tasked with fact-finding and monitoring in the UN human rights system, Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers.

Firsthand accounts from freed Palestinian prisoners, compiled by AF3IRM, a transnational anti-imperialist organization, also confirmed these reports.

“I left little girls in my prison cell crying. Why? Because unspeakable things are happening to them there... Unimaginable things at the hands of the [Israeli] soldiers,” Israa Ja’abis, a Palestinian woman who spent almost eight years in Israeli jails, said upon her release in November last year.

Another freed prisoner Lama Khater also said that she was blindfolded and threatened with rape as a form of intimidation against her.

The report cited another freed female prisoner as saying that “over 15 Palestinian women were sexually assaulted” by Israeli forces who sought to force a confession out of them.

According to the report, Israeli soldiers even keep videotapes of the horrendous sexual abuse to blackmail the abductees following their release.

The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor also shared documented testimonies by female Palestinian detainees who reported sexual violence, torture, inhuman treatment, strip searches, sexual harassment, and rape threats while in the custody of Israeli forces.

“I was threatened with rape and told that I would not see my children if I disobeyed the soldier’s orders,” a 45-year-old resident of Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, who requested anonymity due to safety concerns—told the Euro-Med Monitor team.

She was arrested by Israeli forces on December 28, 2023. She was taken from a UN-run school housing displaced people in the Bureij refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, and held for 43 days.

Last week, the UN Security Council convened a meeting called by Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom and France to focus on a recent report by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, claiming it had found “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed “sexualized torture” against Israeli settlers during Operation Al-Aqsa Strom on October 7.

Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer for the Observer State of Palestine, criticized the Security Council for showing an “unprecedented” reaction to Patten’s report by convening a meeting within a week, but not responding to credible reports of sexual assault against Palestinian women and girls, men and boys.

“For decades, investigations on sexual assault against Palestinian women, men, girls and boys have not led the Security Council to convene a single meeting on the matter,” Mansour said, citing UN rights office (OHCHR) findings that since 7 October Israeli security forces’ arrests were “often accompanied by beating, ill-treatment and humiliation of Palestinian women and men, including acts of sexual assault such as kicking genitals and threats of rape.”

“[Israel] is always the victim, even when it kills and destroys and steals, and not a single Israeli leader, not a single member of the Israeli occupation forces has ever been held accountable for any crime committed against the Palestinian people.”

The claims about Hamas using sexual violence on October 7, promoted by the New York Times, have already been debunked. The so-called “victims” themselves admitted that so such a thing took place.

Sham: New York Times hits new low with discredited ‘Hamas mass rape’ story

New York Times, which falsely accused Hamas of “weaponizing sexual violence” on Oct. 7, has touched a new low in journalistic ethics with the discredited story.

Global backlash

Ironically, while Israel’s decade-long occupation of Palestinian territories and its recent war on Gaza has disproportionately affected Palestinian women, the regime continues to be a member of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

CSW is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

During its annual two-week summit which opened in New York on March 11, Iranian representatives repeated their calls for Israel to be ousted from the UN body.

Speaking at the commission’s 68th annual gathering in New York, Iranian Vice President for Women and Family Affairs Ensieh Khazali urged the removal of Israel from the body for its ongoing onslaught in Gaza.

“On behalf of the powerful women of Iran, and in one voice with the resistant and pacifist women, I urge a revocation of the membership of the terrorist Israeli regime to this commission,” she said.

Kazem Gharibabadi, secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights also demanded the removal of Israel from CSW on the same ground in letters to the secretary general of the United Nations, the president of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the International Women’s Day on March 8.

“Israel’s continued membership [of the commission] is a mockery of human rights principles and international humanitarian law, and a humiliation to the [UN] Commission on the Status of Women and its objectives and missions,” Gharibabadi wrote.

Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations Saeid Irvani also made the same call for the ouster of Israel from the United Nations women’s rights body, citing the regime’s killing of thousands of Palestinian women in relentless strikes against the Gaza Strip.

“On International Women’s Day, empowering women and enhancing their rights requires addressing injustices. Over 9,000 Palestinian women were killed by the Israeli regime amidst the UNCSW [UN Commission on the Status of Women] inaction,” the mission said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Nasser Kan’ani, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, echoed other Iranian officials on International Women’s Day, saying that the world demands the expulsion of Israel from the CSW due to the regime’s crimes against civilians, particularly women and children.

“The expulsion of the usurping Zionist regime from the UN Commission on the Status of Women is a global demand due to the killing of thousands of women and committing crimes against humanity as a result of organized starvation of the civilian population, especially women and children,” he said.

Alireza Yousefi, Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Kingdom of Norway and Iceland, also made the same remarks in a post on X, formerly Twitter

“The majority of the people killed due to war crimes of Israel in the Gaza war are Palestinian women. The necessary action on International Women’s Day on March 8 is the removal of Israel from the UN Commission on the Status of Women,” he wrote.

Rights activists also took on social media and slammed grave injustices inflicted on women in Gaza by the Israeli occupation and criticized the West’s disregard for these violations on the occasion of International Women’s Day and the ongoing CSW meeting.

Former British Labour MP Chris Williamson in a post on X lashed out at UK Labour politicians’ indifference to the violence currently being wielded against Palestinian women.

“When UK Labour politicians talk about women’s rights, it’s just empty rhetoric. These charlatans don’t give a damn about the rights of Palestinian women in Gaza,” he wrote.

“It seems that women’s rights do not include women in Gaza,” wrote Ahmed Smiry, a resident of Gaza.

Fiona Edwards, a rights activist, also called for support for women in Gaza bearing the brunt of a Western-backed attack.

“Stand with Palestinian women on International Women’s Day. The Western-backed Israeli assault on Gaza is a violent assault on women and girls. Israel’s war is a war on women,” she wrote.

“Women and children in Gaza make up 70 percent of Israel’s victims. Two mothers are killed every hour. Women go through childbirth in Gaza without anesthesia, without doctors, midwives, nurses. Tens of thousands of babies have no mother to hold them,” another rights activist, Emeka Gift, said in a post on X.

“Ahead of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, war and its effect on women should be a priority. But for the cruise missile feminists in European politics, there is no fellow feeling. That’s not feminism; it’s an abomination.”

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