“The attacks are fewer, but the murders continue,” he said.
The UN aid coordination office, OCHA, warned on Monday that hostilities continued to be reported in several parts of the Gaza Strip, causing destruction, displacement and casualties.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said last week that since the pause in fighting between Hamas and Israel was announced on October 10, two children were dying in attacks in the enclave at a rate of two a day.
Fighting to survive
Briefing reporters in Geneva, Ms. Calltorp recounted that during her journey that spanned the entire Strip “from Jabalia in the north to Al-Mawasi in the south,” she saw that “being a woman in Gaza today means facing hunger and fear, absorbing trauma and pain, and protecting one’s children from gunshots and cold nights.”
“It means being the last line of protection in a place where security no longer exists,” he insisted.
Ms Calltorp said more than 57,000 women in Gaza are now heads of households and are left to fight in extremely harsh conditions.
“The women showed me how the water soaked their makeshift tents, leaving the children shivering all night,” she explained.
“This is what it means to be a woman today in Gaza, to know that winter is coming and to know that you cannot protect your children from it.”
Food is still scarce
The senior official told the story of a woman he met whose house had been destroyed, “but every morning she returns to the rubble to collect firewood and burns the doors that once housed her family just to prepare breakfast for her children.”
A month and a half after the ceasefire, food remains scarce and four times more expensive than before the war (for example, an egg costs $2 in the Gaza market), which is “out of reach for women without income,” she said.
“For many of the women I met it is completely impossible to feed their families,” Ms. Calltorp insisted.
Displacement and disability
The women she spoke to had been displaced “countless times,” she said: up to 35 times since the start of the war in October 2023, in one case.
“Every move means packing the little they have, carrying their children, their elderly parents, choosing between one unsafe place and another,” Calltorp explained.
She also mentioned the “crisis of women and girls newly disabled by this war,” of whom more than 12,000 live with long-term disabilities related to the war.
With so much going against them and their families, Gaza women “need the ceasefire to hold, they need food, they need cash assistance and they need winter supplies, health services and vital psychosocial support,” the UN Women official said. He stressed how eager they were “to work, lead and rebuild Gaza with their own hands.”
“No woman or girl should have to fight so hard just to survive. We need more help to enter Gaza systematically and safely, and we need the killing to stop,” he concluded.