Gaza Conflict - International Women's Day
"I've forgotten what it means to be a woman. I've forgotten what it means to be a woman." These are the words of Nada Abdelsalam, a woman who was forced to flee from the Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza City to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza due to evacuation orders. Her home was then destroyed by Israeli bombing. Today marks 165 days since Israel began its latest and most horrific assault on the people of Gaza. Since Israel's ground invasion, Nada says she has lost track of the passing days, consumed by the demands of caring for eight children under impossible conditions. The genocide has robbed Nada of more than just her home and possessions; she has lost her sense of identity. She says, "It's a suffering I wouldn't wish upon any woman."
Nineteen-year-old Marah al-Qayed says the war has stripped away her sense of femininity after being displaced with her family to a camp in Deir el-Balah from their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood east of Gaza City. Etemad Assaf is a mother of two who is eight months pregnant with her third. She fled from Jabalia refugee camp to Deir el-Balah and longs for the day she can return home. Sawsan al-Zein is a mother of eight who lost an eye after being injured in the first week of the war when her house on Salah al-Din Street east of Gaza City was bombed. One of her daughters and her son-in-law were killed in the bombing. Sawsan's only wish is for the war to end soon so she can return home to Gaza, even if it lies in ruins.
As women around the world celebrated International Women's Day this month, that is what women were experiencing on the ground in occupied Palestine. Their families have been destroyed, their homes and livelihoods shattered, and their lives changed forever. None of us in this place can claim to understand their struggle or their pain. Those women have known apocalypse. International Women's Day is usually a major public holiday in the Palestinian territories when Gazawi families put on their finest clothes and dine out in hotels and restaurants to celebrate their mothers, daughters and sisters. This year, however, there was no International Women's Day. Health officials in Gaza say nearly 9,000 of the more than 30,000 people confirmed killed in Israel's genocide are women and another 13,000 are children. Many thousands more are believed to still be buried under the rubble.
Palestinian aid agency the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has just had its funding restored after months of being inexcusably suspended by the Federal Albanese Government, noted that an average of 63 women were being killed in Gaza every day, 37 of them mothers. In Gaza, pregnant women are reportedly having caesareans performed without anaesthesia and undergoing hysterectomies without anaesthesia due to post-birth complications. Last year the United Nations reported that of the 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, 15 per cent would likely experience complications during either pregnancy or birth.
German socialist Clara Zetkin first proposed an International Women's Day in 1911 because she wanted to improve women's rights in the workplace. She believed that if women were united as part of a global movement to fight for their demands, then their collective voice would be impossible for lawmakers to ignore. More than a century later, on 8 March this year, hundreds of women gathered at Sydney Town Hall to call for equality in pay and treatment in the workplace. Around the world, tens of thousands marched, including in the United States, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Israel and many other cities to stand with their Palestinian sisters.
International Women's Day is not International Women's Day if it does not speak to the atrocities taking place in Gaza. It was Audre Lorde who said, "I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own." Our feminism is not complete if it fails to humanise and support Palestinian women and children. On days like International Women's Day we have an opportunity to make a real difference by disrupting the status quo and starting a conversation about what women and children are experiencing in Gaza. Free Palestine. End the genocide. Ceasefire now.