The women and girls of Gaza

 

THE women and girls of Gaza are suffering unprecedented violence due to Israel’s horrific assaults. They, along with children, make up 70% of the more than 30,000 killed so far. If not killed, they are bombed out of their homes and forced to take refuge wherever possible. And what is it women, specifically pregnant women, need? Access to healthcare and hospitals. But the attacks on hospitals have severely limited this access and, as we have seen, affected those giving birth, and their babies, to an intolerable extent. 

It is not only about making it incredibly difficult for these women to give birth in anything remotely resembling a safe environment, but about putting their lives and the lives of the newborns at risk. We all saw the five babies left to die in the al-Nasr hospital in November when Israeli forces stormed the hospital and ordered patients, doctors and displaced civilians to leave. Doctors were ordered, ordered by IOF soldiers who knew this would be a death sentence for the newborns, to leave the babies alone on machines and ventilators. Almost three weeks later their decomposing bodies were found.

Almost 300 newborns whose age was 0 have already died in Gaza and more are starving to death every week. But with the extreme food shortage in Gaza  it is not just babies but also lactating and pregnant women who are at risk of malnutrition and general health issues.

Yet 180 women continue to give birth in Gaza daily, and just as we have seen people operated on without anaesthetic, women are also undergoing caesarian births without anaesthetic and amidst shortages of water and sterilisation.

The blocking of aid and restriction of resources in Gaza has led not just to a lack of access to water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities, but to a lack of sanitary products. Women and girls are without these most basic items and are forced to use whatever they can find. Women throughout the world can relate to a certain extent; who hasn’t been caught short and had to turn to a piece of cloth or wadded tissue, but when your home has been bombed and your days are spent just trying to stay alive, to find water and perhaps some food, where do you find this spare cloth or tissue? So they are forced to rip or cut off pieces of their clothing. Not to mention the infections caused by a lack of hygienic conditions and products. Without clean water how are they washing these pieces of cloth? Can we even imagine how this must be affecting their mental health in the midst of so much other horror?

Of course this is not just happening to the girls and women of Gaza, in too many other places they do not have access to good healthcare or sanitary products, but in no other country is our government complicit in denying these to women and girls.

Anyone not decrying these human rights violations is forever shamed.