New Report Finds Forced Starvation in Gaza Is Hitting Women and Girls Hardest
NEW YORK – Today, the Women’s Refugee Commission released the most comprehensive report to date focused explicitly on the impacts of Gaza’s famine on women and girls.
The report, “I Starve Myself So My Children Can Eat,” released days after an independent UN inquiry determined that Israel is committing genocide, provides rare and urgent evidence of how two years of siege and aid blockades are falling heaviest on women and their children. Drawing on eight first-person testimonies from women inside Gaza and 13 interviews with humanitarian staff, including frontline workers in Gaza, the report finds that women often eat last and least. WRC found that despite increasingly serving as heads of households, women are excluded from militarized food distribution sites, which are described as “death traps” and “graveyards,” and where they face violence, harassment, and humiliation. Our research documents women frequently going 48-72 hours without food so their children can eat, collapsing from hunger as they wait for hours in dangerous aid lines, giving birth without food or care, and girls being pushed into early marriage as families struggle to survive.
“After two years of Israel’s devastating blockades on food, fuel, and medicines in Gaza, this report documents, in women’s own words, how this forced famine is destroying women’s lives, and the lives of their children,” said Sarah Costa, Executive Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Starvation is forcing women and girls to endure a slow death in unbearable circumstances. Mothers are starving so their children can live. Women give birth to babies so weak they cannot even cry. Girls are being forced into marriage for a bag of flour. These are not byproducts of war – they are deliberate policies that weaponize food and strip women of their dignity, safety, and survival.”
As world leaders gather for the High-Level Week at the UN General Assembly, WRC calls for the Government of Israel to immediately lift restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. All UN Member States must take urgent action to prevent acts of genocide and suppress the use of starvation as a weapon of war and ensure perpetrators of these violations are held accountable. Unless militarized food distribution ends and a protected UN-led humanitarian response is restored, women and children will continue to suffer the heaviest toll.
You can read the report in full here.
Key Findings
Women are starving themselves to feed their children.
Health workers report women regularly fainting after 48–72 hours without food. A widow explained: “I starve myself so my children can eat. At aid centers women endure insults, humiliation, and fear for their daughters’ safety. This is what survival has become.”
Food distribution has become militarized and deadly.
Community-based aid points once run by UN and civilian humanitarian groups have now been replaced by inaccessible militarized zones where women face stampedes, harassment, and live fire. Many describe them as “death traps.” One widow said: “The so-called distribution points have become graveyards. … People walk for hours only to face gunfire and chaos.”
Pregnant and breastfeeding women are in acute crisis.
Malnutrition is leading to miscarriages, preterm births, and infants born too weak to cry. A woman in her final trimester told researchers: “Pregnancy should be a joy; in Gaza it feels like fear and hunger.”
Adolescent girls face acute malnutrition and exploitation.
More than 200,000 girls in Gaza are at risk, with reports of anemia, early marriage, and heightened protection risks. One mother said: “I was forced to marry off my daughter because we had nothing to eat. It was the only way to relieve the burden.”
Widows and women-headed households face systematic exclusion.
Women without male relatives struggle most at militarized aid lines, often leaving entire households without food. A grandmother caring for orphaned children explained: “We depend entirely on aid, but most days we come back with nothing.” One widow told us: “The loss of my husband shattered us. He was the one who provided for the family, and his death left a gap that nothing can replace. Now the burden of survival falls completely on me. Every day is a battle to secure food, water, and shelter.”
Women and girls with disabilities are doubly excluded.
Barriers to mobility mean many cannot reach aid at all. As one woman with a disability explained: “Standing in aid lines is harder, moving for water is harder, and everything takes more strength than I have. The system starves us slowly and strips us of dignity.”
Hunger and starvation compound women’s grief and trauma.
Women describe a collective psychological collapse under the weight of siege, bombardment, grief, and hunger, while also witnessing their children’s trauma. As one grieving mother said: “My dreams are not complicated. I want my children to be safe, to eat until they are full, to return to their studies, and to grow up with dignity. I want no mother to live what I lived, standing powerless while her child died in front of her. Above all, I want peace, food, and shelter, so that our lives can be human again.”