Executive Summary

The ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip has compounded several humanitarian and legal violations, particularly inrelation to the reproductive rights of Palestinian women. Since the launch of its military offensive in October 2023, Israelhas systematically targeted Palestinian women in ways that undermine their ability to survive, give birth, and raisechildren. More than 12,300 women have been killed, 4,700 women and children are missing, and approximately 800,000women have been forcibly displaced. An estimated one million women and girls now suffer from acute food insecurity.Israel’s actions constitute a deliberate attempt to impair the reproductive capacities of Palestinian women, aimed atdismantling the future of Palestinian society. Through the bombing of shelters, destruction of hospitals, blockading ofmedical and hygiene supplies, and attacks on fertility clinics and maternity wards, Israel’s policy of erasure is notincidental, it is intentional.

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Executive Summary

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is vital inproviding humanitarian aid, education, and health services to Palestinian refugees across Jordan, Lebanon,Syria, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Beyond its humanitarian role, UNRWA represents aninternational commitment to Palestinian refugees' right of return, as established in UN General AssemblyResolution 194 in 1948. However, Israel has long sought to undermine the agency through financial, political,and military means.Recent Israeli actions have escalated, with the Israeli Knesset passing legislation banning UNRWAoperations in areas under Israeli control, effectively revoking its legal status. Concurrently, Israel hasintensified military attacks on UNRWA facilities. In the Gaza Strip since October 2023, Israeli forces havetargeted 310 UNRWA sites, destroying schools and killing 273 UNRWA employees alongside hundreds ofcivilians sheltering in its facilities. Throughout the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military has been turningUNRWA facilities into military bases and detention centers, and has closed UNRWA’s headquarters in EastJerusalem. These actions violate multiple international legal agreements and aim to erase Palestinian refugeeidentity and their legal rights.

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The shocking human cost that occupation has taken on Palestinian women is laid bare in research published today. Combining research, extensive surveys, and first-hand testimonies from over 40 Palestinian women, Palestinian Women: The Disproportionate Impact of The Israeli Occupation provides new insight into the gendered experience of occupation, looking into four issues in particular:

• women refugees
• the impact of residency revocation on Palestinian women in Jerusalem
• the experience of women prisoners
• Gazans’ access to health

Co-authored by four Palestinian NGOs – the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH), Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD), the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), and Women Media and Development (TAM), the report includes detailed findings that demonstrate how the oppression occupation has permeated women’s daily lives, and the particular impact is has had on women in Palestinian refugee camps, Palestinian women living in Jerusalem, women prisoners, and residents of Gaza who require health services.

The impact on refugee women

Researchers spoke to 500 Palestinian refugee women from 12 Palestinian camps (7 in the West Bank, 5 in Gaza). Their findings included the following:

• A third of women surveyed had been directly exposed to physical assault by Israeli Occupation Forces. 9% had been exposed to threats of being attacked by police dogs during Israeli night raids on their homes.
• Over a third (37%) of respondents had been exposed to detention or interrogation, while 38% said that they or members of their households had been exposed to verbal abuse during Israeli army raids, at checkpoints or while visiting religious places.
• Nearly a quarter (24%) were forced to live in shelters or with extended family. 22% were forced to live under unhealthy conditions. 13% stated that the female and male members of their families were separated as a result of having to live in shelters.
• More than one in five (21%) had been exposed to beatings or tear gas at Israeli checkpoints while they were pregnant. 4% reported that they aborted or gave birth at Israeli checkpoints.
• The majority (64%- 321 cases) had been unable to visit religious or recreational places because of Occupation restrictions.

Jerusalem: Residency Revocation and Family Reunification

According to official figures, 14,595 Palestinians from East Jerusalem had their residency status revoked between 1967 and the end of 2016.

Through residency revocations, Israel has separated husbands from wives, parents from children, and extended families from one another, causing traumatic complications for women attempting to remain with their families in both Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This leads to traumatic fears of separation from children for mothers and an entrenching of patriarchal practices across society. Palestinian women living in Jerusalem lose residency rights if they get divorced or their husbands remarry. Limiting their access to justice, female victims of domestic violence fear reporting abuse to authorities in case they are forcibly transferred away from their children.

Women prisoners

Since the beginning of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine in 1967, approximately 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained by Israeli military forces. According to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs’ 2017 annual report, 1,467 children were arrested last year.

Our researchers spoke to prisoners who experienced physical and psychological torture at arrest and imprisonment, and traumatic, gendered treatment, including:

• Women denied access to menstrual products while detained
• A woman arrested while pregnant who gave birth while chained to a prison hospital bed
• Ex-prisoners who report being subjected to rape and death threats during interrogation, including a girl in of 15-years old threatened with rape
• Women who were subjected to frequent forced and violent strip searches
• A prisoner who reported toothache, only to have the wrong tooth removed

Access to Health in Gaza

Israel exercises strict control Gaza’s borders, a policy of ‘actual authority’, constituting continued occupation, despite the withdrawal of its permanent presence. This control in particular affects those who need medical treatment outside of Gaza’s struggling health system, who require permission to leave. The report shows that the rate of approval applications is falling year-by-year:

• 92.5% of applications were successful in 2012
• 88.7% in 2013
• 82.4% in 2014
• 77.5% in 2015
• 62.1% in 2016

Of the 26,282 permit applications submitted by patients aiming to exit through Erez in 2016, 8,242 (31.4%) were delayed. Many applicants received no response from border authorities, even after lawyers filed formal applications on their behalf. These delays regularly extend months and years beyond medical appointments, worsening already life-threatening diseases and in some cases resulting in death.

Read the full report here, or download it here:

Palestinian Women – The Disproportionate Impact of the Israeli Occupation

Christian Aid director, Dr Daleep Mukarji, has recently returned from Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. While in the West Bank town of Qalqilya he witnessed the construction of the Israeli security fence which will eventually surround the West Bank.

My Christian Aid colleagues and I spent an afternoon in the Palestinian West Bank town of Qalqilya looking at a huge concrete wall. The Israeli government, which is building it, calls it a 'security fence' which they say is designed to keep suicide bombers and other terrorists from getting into Israel. Our partners call it the 'apartheid wall'.

This massive wall, which practically surrounds this once lively city, is about 25 feet high and 12 feet wide and is punctuated by a series of watchtowers. We felt we were in prison - it was very depressing.

Yet we were in Qalqilya only for about two hours to see the work of our partners, and to experience for a short time the kind of thing that ordinary Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have to go through every day at the hands of the Israeli government. We went from Jerusalem with colleagues from the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC) to visit the West Bank.

The journey, which should have been relatively short, took hours as we had to negotiate roadblocks, check points and barriers that are every-day realities for Palestinians.

On the way to Qalqilya, we saw from a vantage point what this new wall of separation was doing to Palestinian villages, communities and their economy. It separated farmers from their lands and their water supplies, closed access roads and destroyed many olive trees.

The roads to Qalqilya were blocked - with only one entrance open, controlled by Israeli army. We waited 45 minutes while we were checked. We saw many who were barred from entering, even vehicles with supplies and approval to enter. We were allowed to enter, but our Palestinian colleague from PARC was refused.

Once there we met with a local facilitator in a taxi. As we entered the city. It seemed to be a ghost town - the shops were closed and the streets deserted.

This new wall did not always follow the 'green line' - the armistice line created after the 1967 war, which divides Israel and the Occupied Territories. In fact, from maps we were shown and from what we saw, it often entered deep into the Palestinian West Bank seeming to encircle pockets of population dividing them from their lands and from each other. Some villages were now in 'no-mans land' - as if the Israeli authority wanted to erase them from the map.

We asked an official from the Israeli Foreign Office if this new wall was an attempt to change the border and the ground realities. He said that it was a security fence that Israel needed to stop Palestinian's coming into Israel. Yet it stopped Palestinians from freely moving around the West Bank itself.

I found the whole experience very sad. It appeared that huge, open-air prisons were being built, to destabilise and demoralise Palestinian communities. Both Israeli and Palestinian partners spoke of the horrors of this new wall and its very real costs to both communities.

Would it help the peace process? Our impression was probably not. Would it help to provide security to Israelis? We honestly felt that the long-term solution to security for both peoples is peace, healing, reconciliation and a recognition of the rights of each other and that the wall is not the way to achieve this.

As we left Qalqilya, passing the checkpoint again and picking up our colleagues from PARC, we saw people who had been waiting around even longer. They were being denied the right to enter their own area, to see family and friends and to go about their daily lives.

This wall is not the solution. I came away wondering when we would see barriers being broken and true peace brought to this area. This can only happen when there is a viable, sovereign and sustainable Palestinian State recognised by Israel and the world community. Then in partnership with Israel it could put up a border fence that both accepted and recognised both communities' rights to security, peace and acceptance.

I left with a prayer in my heart - for peace, for justice and for urgent action by all concerned for find a lasting solution to the tragedy of the Middle East.

Based on Christian Aid's work with local organisations in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the last five decades, this report looks at how and why ordinary Palestinians find themselves in conditions of deepening poverty. Today's acute impoverishment is in danger of destroying Palestinian society. Failure to address the root causes will be felt far beyond Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

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Contents
• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Recommendations
• Introduction

• Chapter 1 - Roots of poverty: Palestinian history 1917-1994
• Chapter 2 - Coming to a halt: the impact of closure
• Chapter 3 - Lost ground: Israeli settlements and Palestinian land
• Chapter 4 - Every last drop: Israel's control of water
• Chapter 5 - A bleak harvest: the undermining of agriculture
• Chapter 6 - 'A process of deterioration': health, the intifada and closure
• Chapter 7 - Unequal playing field: the effect of integration on trade and the economy
• Chapter 8 - The divided city: Jerusalem and the loss of an economic centre
• Chapter 9 - Poverty or development: the reform of the Palestinian Authority
• Chapter 10 - Prospects and conclusions

• Glossary
• Appendix: International humanitarian law
• Notes
• Acknowledgements