Remarks by Ajith Sunghay, Head of UN Human Rights - Palestine
International Women's Day- closing event
Excellency Minister Mona Al Khalili, Amb Tarja, RC Ramiz and my dear colleagues,
Born into Israeli occupation, under Israeli blockade, and amidst devastating violence, Palestinian women are leading precarious lives, exceedingly vulnerable to forced displacement, dispossession, arbitrary detention, loss, and constant fear.
More than a century has passed since International Women’s Day was born out of what was, essentially, a human rights movement. Millions of women in different parts of the world marched and organized to demand labor and voting rights.
In 2026, it is a shame that Palestinian women are still systematically denied their basic rights. This includes their right to life, to safety and security, to education and healthcare, to dignified living, and to protection, not only from gender inequality, but from racial segregation and apartheid.
A Palestinian woman’s life cycle is shaped by structural violence from childhood to adolescence, adulthood, and into old age.
As a child, she is not safe. In Gaza, more than 20,000 girls and boys were killed due to Israeli attacks since 7 October 2023. In the same period in the West Bank, roughly 1 in 5 of the 1072 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers are children. The youngest victim there was Laila, a 2-month-old baby girl who was killed by Israeli gunfire in her bed in Jenin.
The right to education is violated at a devastating scale: Israeli bombardment in Gaza destroyed most schools and led to the killing of over 17,000 school children since October 2023.In the West Bank, over 100 Palestinian school children were killed in the same period. Settler violence, discriminatory and excessive movement restrictions, as well as raids, operations, and detentions by Israeli security forces have also greatly disrupted schooling for girls and boys.
Palestinian girls experience adolescence under extremely harsh conditions.
How many girls are coming of age in displacement? How many have gotten their first menstruation without access to clean water and basic hygiene products? How many are now falling victim to negative coping mechanisms such as child marriage and sexual exploitation?
Later in life, Palestinian women’s exercise of their right to start a family is also uniquely fraught.
Pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza are struggling to get enough nutrition. Some had to watch their newborns and children starve to death at the peak of the hunger crisis caused by the Israeli blockade and aid restrictions. At least165 children died of hunger in Gaza since October 2023 — a slow, painful, and completely preventable death.
Women in Gaza are also struggling to exercise their right to access adequate healthcare. Israeli bombardment largely destroyed the healthcare system in Gaza with 60% of health delivery points currently non-functional. Of those that remain partially operational, only 15% are capable of providing emergency obstetric care.
Women’s right to work is another frontier of struggle.
Palestinian women are among the most educated in the region. They are also among the least economically active women in the world. The distance between those two facts is occupation, incessant violence, and associated skyrocketing unemployment.
Against the odds of occupation, as well as discrimination and gender inequality and gender-based violence in their own communities, Palestinian women are carving spaces to advocate for change, to extend help, and to bear witness.
The price has been heavy.
As teachers, healthcare professionals, journalists, and aid workers, Palestinian women have been killed and injured in the thousands alongside men by Israeli fire in Gaza.
Women human rights defenders and anti-occupation activists are locked up alongside men in Israeli detention facilities, suffering inhumane conditions, torture, and ill-treatment.
Women like Mayson, the 37-year-old mother from Gaza whose story we told on International Women’s Day, are not giving up on their missing loved ones. Mayson knows where her late husband is, but she can’t reach the rubble that became his grave in the north.
Thousands like Mayson are pacing between hospitals, morgues, and displacement sites in search of information about their family members.
Women’s lives, women’s choices should not be this difficult in 2026.
A girl should never have to choose between school and humiliation and violence at an Israeli checkpoint. A mother should never have to choose between watching her children die of hunger or getting herself killed in an aid queue. A woman should never have to choose between her freedom and her peaceful activism.
Every Palestinian woman and girl is entitled not merely to survive, but to live in freedom, equality, dignity, and peace.
This is a human rights crisis. The solution starts with ending the root causes of occupation, discrimination, violence, and impunity.
