Palestine Solidarity Committee highlights plight of women and children in Gaza on International Woman’s Day

March 8 is International Women’s Day when the world focuses its spotlight on women, celebrates their achievements and reflects on the miles needed to reach gender parity. The Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine (SLCSP), while standing in solidarity with women the world over, draws attention to the plight of women in Palestine, specifically in Gaza, being killed and injured in unprecedented ways, inhumanly displaced and denied basic necessities under a devastating siege.

Calling for an immediate end to the bombing and the lifting of the aid blockade that has propelled Gaza into a famine with many children already dying of starvation, the SLCSP decries the wilful apathy of the Western and Arab leaders and demands action beyond meaningless platitudes in securing an urgent ceasefire and ensuring the safety, security and unimpeded access to food, medicine and other essentials for women and children.

In the more than 30,500 killed by the Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023, an estimated 9,000 are said to be women and over 12,500 children, though the number is likely to be an underestimate given the many buried in the rubbles of the indiscriminate bombing. The UN Women has called the war on Gaza, a war on women as well, and warned if the Israeli bombings continue at the current rate, an average of 63 women will continue to be killed every day.  Already an estimated 37 mothers are killed every day, leaving their families devastated and their children, many of them new-borns, bereft of protection. Thousands of women have also become widows and heads of households.

The brutal blockade has also seen 9 out of 10 women scavenge for food, forced go without meals for days or skip the meagre meals to feed their children. Close to one million of the 1.9 million displaced are women and girls, and all of them are forced to seek refuge in precarious sheltering conditions, with nowhere and no one being safe.

Gaza has been under a debilitating Israeli siege for more than 16 years, with its residents denied freedom of movement, half the population unemployed and one-third not having enough food to eat. Women and girls have been subject to arrests, harassment, rape and torture. They have been often denied and deprived of basic essentials, including feminine hygiene products, and subject to discriminatory practices. World leaders have been passive onlookers to these systemic violations of fundamental human rights and human dignity.

The ongoing war on Gaza is but is a brutal augmentation of the slow strangulation of the Strip. An accelerated genocide.
This is a time for action, not platitudes. The SLCSP calls on leaders of the US and EU countries to walk the talk about their touted concerns for women and children and do what’s urgently needed to stop the killing, the maiming and the displacement of women and children.  This means ending the supply of weapons and other military support to Israel, imposing necessary economic sanctions on Israel and demanding an immediate, unconditional and lasting ceasefire.  It also calls on Arab leaders to go beyond ‘condemning Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip’ and actively work toward ending the war and saving the thousands of lives at stake.

On this International Women's Day, the SLCSP, while demanding that no effort be spared to ensure the protection of women and girls, and safe access to rapid, unimpeded, and gender-responsive humanitarian assistance, stands in solidarity with the women in Gaza, amplifying their voices, and demand for swift and comprehensive action to alleviate their suffering.
In solidarity towards a future where every woman, regardless of her circumstances, can live with dignity, free from the spectre of death and starvation.