Killing of 9,000 women in Gaza spurs calls for Israel’s ouster from UN women’s body

“She was injured very badly, I held her in my arms in the car, I was stroking her face and trying to assure her ‘we are nearly there [hospital]’,” a Palestinian teen narrated the story of her mother, who was killed in an Israeli bombing in February in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

A heartbreaking photo of Shehab Omar Abu al-Hanud, 19, clinging to the shrouded body of his mother, Ghada, on a hospital bed in Rafah, was appropriately titled “The Last Farewell.”

Ghada was killed in an Israeli airstrike after a big wardrobe fell on her, when she, her husband and their two children were trying to rush out of a shelter they were staying in the border city under siege.

“My father found her under the wardrobe that had fallen on her, we cleared the debris on top of her and kept calling her name, begging her to talk to us, but she wasn’t able to respond,” Shehab recalled in conversation with journalists, struggling to hold back his copious tears.

When they arrived at the hospital teeming with injured people and finally found a doctor, he had one cursory look at her and told them there was no hope and that she should be moved to the tent where the bodies of the deceased are kept, a substitute for the mortuary.

“But we saw she was still breathing, she was moving… we talked to the doctor, argued with him,” he said, angry and exasperated.

Ghada managed to stay alive for a further 40 minutes when the doctor brought her back to the treatment tent and put her on intravenous fluids and oxygen.

“She was everything to me,” Shehab said. “She was my mother and my sister and my friend. Life without her has no meaning. I have a right to have a mother … a right to live with my mother.”

“She really wanted to talk to us, but she couldn’t … seconds before her soul left her, a tear rolled down her face… she seemed to smile at us, and then she left, her soul went to God’s mercy.”

‘A war on women’

The Israeli regime’s genocidal war on Gaza, now into its sixth month, has already claimed more than 31,700 lives in Gaza, including at least 9,000 women. Many are still unaccounted for.

The UN Women said earlier this month that the number is “likely an underestimate” because many more women are presumed dead under the rubble.

It also estimated that an average of 63 women is getting killed in the blockaded, war-ravaged territory every day, with 37 of them being mothers, leaving their children “with diminished protection.”

With Israel using starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3 million population of Gaza, 4 in 5 women (84 percent) in Gaza told UN Women that at least one of their family members had to skip meals to feed their children.

“In 95 percent of those cases, mothers are the ones going without food, skipping at least one meal to feed their children,” with some mothers scavenging for food under rubble or in dumpsters, it added.

Another report published in mid-January revealed that nearly one million women in Gaza are displaced, and at least 3,000 women have become widows and new heads of households, following their male partner’s death.

The facts mentioned above, the report said, are why the war on Gaza is also “a war on women.”

‘Shocking reports’

A group of UN experts in a statement last month expressed alarm over human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls in both the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

The experts said reports of “deliberate targeting” and “extrajudicial killing” of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing in Gaza was “shocking.”

In January, Palestinian woman Hala Khreis, was “executed” by an Israeli sniper in northern Gaza, even though a verified and widely circulated video showed her holding the hand of her small grandson who was waving a white flag and was walking along an evacuation route which had been declared safe.

As per the rules of armed conflict enshrined in the Geneva Convention, a white flag “is a flag of truce” for people, both civilians and combatants, who seek protection or surrender during the war.

Khreis’ children said an Israeli sniper shot their aged mother in “cold blood” despite her waving a white flag and walking along an evacuation route that had been declared “safe”  by the occupying forces.

Khreis isn’t the only one though. According to UN experts, an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza.

“There are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown.”