The war where women’s bodies lost their rights

Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, February 20, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

There is no tent for the body in Gaza.

No safe space where the female body can unfold without fear.

The war strips us bare — not only of our homes and belongings, but of the rituals that make us human: bathing, menstruating, grieving in private.

But even without shelter, our bodies endure.

They remember.

They resist.

In October, I bled for ten days without access to a proper bathroom.

The house we fled to — like most shelters in Gaza — had no privacy. Forty people slept in two rooms. The bathroom had no door, only a torn curtain. I remember waiting for everyone to sleep so I could clean myself with a bottle of water and scraps of cloth. I remember praying I wouldn’t stain the mattress I shared with three cousins. I remember the shame — not of my body, but of being unable to care for it.

In war, the body loses its rights, especially the female body.

The headlines rarely speak of this, of what it means for a girl to get her period under bombardment, of mothers forced to bleed in silence and miscarry on cold floors or give birth under drones. The war in Gaza is not only a story of rubble and airstrikes. It is a story of bodies interrupted, invaded, and denied rest. And yet, somehow, these bodies continue.

As a Palestinian woman and a displaced student now living in Egypt, I carry this bodily memory with me. Not as a metaphor, but as a fact. My body still flinches at loud noises. My digestion falters. My sleep comes in fragments. I know many women — friends, relatives, neighbors — who have developed chronic illnesses during the war, who lost their periods for months, whose breasts dried up while trying to breastfeed in shelters. War enters the body like an illness and stays.

The Gazan body is a map of interruption. It learns early to contract itself — to take up less space, to stay alert, to suppress desire, hunger, bleeding. The public nature of displacement destroys privacy, while the constant fear gnaws at the nervous system. Women who once guarded their modesty now change clothes in front of strangers. Girls stop talking about their cycles. Dignity becomes a burden no one can afford.

This is the paradox of survival: the same body that is denied safety becomes the instrument of resistance. Women boil lentils over candlelight, they calm children in basements, they cradle the dying. These acts are not passive; they are radical. To menstruate, to carry, to feed, to soothe — amid destruction — is to insist on life.

I return, again and again, to the image of my mother during the war. Her back hunched over a pot, her hands shaking, her eyes scanning the ceiling with every sound. She didn’t eat until everyone else did. She didn’t sleep until the children did. Her body bore the architecture of war and motherhood at once. I realize now how political her exhaustion was — how her labor, like that of so many Palestinian women, defied the logic of annihilation.

There is no tent for the body in Gaza. No safe space where the female body can unfold without fear. The war strips us bare — not only of our homes and belongings, but of the rituals that make us human: bathing, menstruating, grieving in private. But even without shelter, our bodies endure. They remember. They resist.

And maybe, in their trembling persistence, they write the truest history of all.

Mariam Mohammed El Khatib is a Palestinian writer, poet, and activist from Gaza. She studies dentistry in Egypt, where she also continues her literary work. Her writing — published in platforms such as This Week in Palestine, We Are Not Numbers, and Avery Review — explores themes of memory, war, and resistance, especially from feminist and existential perspectives. She uses storytelling as a form of cultural resistance, documenting the Palestinian experience and amplifying the voices of her people.