“We remain bold and courageous to survive”

While world leaders tout a “ceasefire” in Gaza, the reality on the ground tells a very different story, one marked by ongoing Israeli strikes, debilitating aid restrictions, and Palestinians excluded from their own peace process. For women across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the violence, deprivation, and overwhelming burden of sustaining families amid bombardment, displacement, and blockade continue, unrelenting.

Right now, over 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza are facing childbirth without functioning hospitals, adequate medical care, or basic safety (OCHA). One in five babies are born premature or underweight, the result of a systematically destroyed healthcare system (UNICEF/WFP). Since October 2023, the Israeli military has killed more than 38,000 women and girls (UN Women). Israel’s targeting of neonatal and maternity care centers in Gaza has directly harmed newborn survival, including rises in miscarriages, birth defects, and lasting vulnerabilities among newborns (OHCHR).

These aren’t just statistics. They’re daughters, mothers, sisters, grandmothers – women whose lives and stories deserve to be seen, honored, and remembered. Women who are forging resilience, resistance, and profound care under impossible conditions.

That’s why we recently gathered with grantee allies on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank for a conversation centering the lived realities of Palestinian women – women who are living through the unimaginable, and who still find words to share with us. As one of them put it plainly: “We are not numbers. Palestinian women cannot be called numbers.” It is our duty to bear witness and do what we can to resource the life-sustaining work of their organizations.

Sustaining a Movement Through Genocide

Among the allies who joined us is a women’s rights organization in Gaza that has refused to stop its work even as genocide has dismantled everything around them. Its leaders spoke with searing honesty about what it costs to keep going: jobs lost, a healthcare system collapsed, the daily struggle to provide essential services amid unrelenting destruction. Like so many movements that have endured attempts at their erasure, they have kept their work alive through sheer collective will, refusing to let genocide be the final word on who they are.

As an example of this courage and clarity, our allies told us: “Despite everything, we the Palestinian women are still dreamers… and we remain bold and courageous to survive.”

One speaker shared her own journey – from receiving support through the organization to becoming one of its leaders. “I consider myself an agent of change right now,” she said. She described what displacement looks like up close: giving birth during war, the suffering of pregnant and lactating women cut off from healthcare and medicine, the famine that has settled into bodies that still do all they can to nourish new life.

Land, Body, and Memory

Just as Israeli militarism and genocide devastates communities, it devastates the land they depend on. Soil, aquifers, olive groves – the biological memory of a place, and so many aspects of life itself – are being destroyed alongside the people who tend them.

A leader from a women-led environmental justice partner organization, working with communities across the West Bank and Gaza, joined us as well, and described territory the way other global movements have come to understand it too – not just as land, but as something inseparable from the body and from memory. “Women are not only responding but also leading and resisting in organized ways,” she told us. She described how so many of these leaders are defending women’s bodies and defending the Earth at once – two interconnected threads of the same larger vision of survival and resistance.

This defense is visible in daily, concrete acts. In the West Bank, rural women are on the frontlines protecting agricultural land from confiscation and settler violence simply by maintaining a presence that helps prevent its seizure. Others lead cooperatives reviving traditional farming, saving indigenous seeds, and building food sovereignty. They are organizing household water collection, documenting infrastructure violations when systems are demolished, tracking environmental harms like settlement pollution and sharing these realities with international audiences.

Onward in Struggle

We are deeply moved by our partners’ resistance and resilience, their resolve to continue caring for their communities and their land under conditions built to make that impossible. So many Palestinian women have carried, in their histories and their bodies, the damage caused by occupation and genocide. And still they respond with collective care, organizing, and hope.

The two organizations represented at our event are just a small part of the larger network of social movement organizations we are proud to support on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank through the Palestine Emergency Fund – and will continue supporting for as long as this work is needed.

Because the truth is, there has been no ceasefire for the women carrying their families through one heartbreak after another. The headlines may move on, but the Israeli government’s determination to displace and eradicate Palestinians, including women and children, have not.

If these stories have moved you, we ask you to move with us. The Palestine Emergency Fund was built for this moment – to continue sustaining women’s organizing, healthcare access, and the defense of land and life across Gaza and the West Bank, for as long as it takes.