UN report: displaced women in Gaza face rape, sexual abuse and forced marriage
Amira Hass reports in Haaretz on 12 October 2026:
A United Nations body has released a report based on conversations with 230 Palestinian women forcibly displaced in Gaza, shedding light on the largely silenced issue of sexual violence and gender-based oppression in displacement sites.
Domestic violence featured prominently in the group discussions, with women describing physical and emotional abuse by their husbands, children, brothers and fathers-in-law.
They also reported sexual exploitation, marital rape, child and forced marriage, abuse, restrictions on movement, the appropriation of aid packages and threats to take away children orphaned by their fathers. All of this takes place in overcrowded sites with virtually no privacy.
The report, written and published in September by the United Nations Population Fund, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, does not quantify the prevalence of abuse in displacement sites or estimate the number of victims.
Instead, it focuses on the phenomenon and seeks to give a voice to the 230 women who participated. It is not based on a representative sample, and girls did not participate in the discussions; the women were between 18 and 63 years old.
According to the report, places where women are particularly vulnerable to assault by strangers include long lines for water, food and aid distribution points, and toilets. According to testimonies, some men take advantage of the queues to rub up against women. Toilets and showers are shared by unrelated families, and cases of sexual harassment and even rape have been documented there.
The field research and interviews, conducted between December 2025 and January 2026 in 16 focus groups, were led by the Women’s Affairs Center, an independent feminist organization founded in 1991 to strengthen women and their individual and collective status in Palestinian society.
The testimonies and insights gathered during the discussions were analyzed by ACAPS Middle East Analysis Hub, an organization specializing in data analysis in humanitarian crises, based in Amman.
The women involved were not required to disclose personal experiences as part of their participation, and at times used indirect or softened language to describe violence. In five of the focus groups, women mentioned cases they had heard about in which soldiers sexually harassed women passing through military checkpoints, as they fled from bombarded areas to areas designated as humanitarian zones.
The report’s authors assume that women refrained from discussing violence by armed Palestinian men, whether members of Hamas or of the militias backed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, for fear of retaliation and social stigma.
“The findings should therefore not be interpreted as indicative of the prevalence or absence of gender-based violence perpetrated by Palestinian armed actors,” the report states.
The focus group facilitators, participants and report authors are well aware that violence against women is not a new phenomenon. But the discussions clearly indicate a significant deterioration in the scale and forms of violence and oppression since the war began.
In every group, women described partners who had never been violent before but had begun abusing them under the pressure of loss, poverty and displacement. One woman from the Gaza City area said in a group discussion: “My husband never raised his voice at me until the war … But when our house was bombed and everything we owned was lost, he became irritable, and he takes it out on me and the children.”
At the same time, the report notes, women have nowhere to flee and no one to turn to for help. Forced displacement has dismantled family and community support structures. Official institutions meant to provide protection, including the police, courts and social welfare offices, are no longer functioning: they have been bombed, are located in areas under Israeli military control, or are difficult and expensive to reach because of destroyed roads.
Tribal mechanisms for resolving disputes have also lost their influence. According to the women’s testimonies, these mechanisms tend to preserve “family peace” rather than put a definitive stop to violence. In addition, Israel has in recent years barred established international aid organizations with expertise in counseling women from operating in the Gaza Strip.
The women described several forms of forced marriage: arrangements between two families without the woman’s consent, the marriage of a widow to her brother-in-law, and the forced marriage of a rape victim to her rapist or another man
All participants said they had been forcibly displaced between two and 10 times, with a median of seven times. The discussions took place in Gaza City and Khan Yunis. Around 1.1 million displaced people live in the two areas, including 480,000 women and girls, in hundreds of displacement sites, either tent camps or school buildings. Gaza City has 428 such sites, while Khan Yunis has 516, housing more than 840,000 displaced people.
Up to around 40 percent of displacement camps and shelters lack an official management body responsible for installing lighting, maintaining shared toilets and showers, ensuring their safety and serving as an address for complaints. In the discussions, the absence of such a body was linked to a heightened sense of insecurity.
A displaced Palestinian woman sits inside a classroom-turned-shelter in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, September. Credit: Ramadan Abed/Reuters
The women described marriage in Gaza as both a means of survival and a tool of exploitation. They reported several forms of forced marriage: arrangements between two families without the woman’s consent, the marriage of a widow to her brother-in-law, and the forced marriage of a rape victim to her rapist or another man.
“When rape cases are discovered in schools,” used for shelters, “you find weddings and celebrations at the school the next day,” a woman from Khan Yunis said.
Early and forced marriage are not new phenomena in Gaza. In 2019-2020, about a quarter of married women aged 20 to 49 had married before turning 18. However, the report notes, child marriage had been declining. Since the war began, child marriage and pregnancies among adolescent girls have increased.
Participants cited economic incentives for early marriage, including offers of sacks of flour or a tent in exchange for a child bride. They also linked child marriage to the destruction of schools and the collapse of the education system, despite efforts to provide schooling at displacement sites. By contrast, when an unmarried working woman wants to marry, her family may prevent her from doing so to ensure that her income continues to support them.
The women most vulnerable to economic or sexual exploitation, restrictions on their autonomy and abuse are widows, divorced and separated women, women with disabilities and older women. According to the report, widows and divorced women are particularly vulnerable to sexual extortion by men who control access to essential resources, including water, medical care, medication and food.
Reports of sexual harassment at displacement centers also emerged during Israel’s previous wars in the enclave. Since the current war began in 2023, the additional difficulties women face compared with men have been widely documented. These include having to remain covered even in extreme heat because they have no private space, showering less frequently for fear of harassment, avoiding toilets at night and struggling to find sanitary pads.
The rise in child marriage and pregnancies among adolescent girls resulting from rape or lack of knowledge about sexual health was also discussed in the earlier stages of the war. Yet there has been a tendency, or an expectation, not to discuss these phenomena publicly or in the media in depth. The report’s initiators and participants hope to change that.
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