By Quds News Network
Gaza (Quds News Network)- More than 20,000 Palestinian women and girls have been killed in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, according to a new report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. That’s more than one woman or girl every hour since the genocide began in October 2023.
These victims were not just numbers. They were mothers, daughters, doctors, teachers, workers, students, and leaders. Each played a vital role in holding their families and communities together.
Among the 42,620 children who lost at least one parent, around 6,500 lost their mothers.
“It’s a wound no child can truly heal from,” the report said.
Over 1 million women and girls in Gaza have been forcibly displaced. Among them are 150,000 pregnant women and new mothers. Many are giving birth in tents, bombed homes, or what’s left of destroyed hospitals, often without clean water, medical staff, or safety.
Giving birth in Gaza has become a life-threatening act, according to the report.
More than 80% of Gaza’s health facilities have been destroyed. Only five hospitals offer partial maternity services. One in every three pregnancies is now considered high-risk. One in five babies is born preterm or underweight.
Thousands of women have died from preventable causes, including childbirth complications, infections, and untreated chronic illnesses, due to Israel’s blockade and repeated targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system.
These deaths are rarely counted in the official toll. “Their absence is one of the genocide’s many hidden tolls,” Euro-Med Monitor warned.
Starvation has become a weapon. Over 95% of pregnant and breastfeeding women suffer from severe malnutrition. Families go days without food as Israel continues to block basic supplies including baby formula.
“Starving fetuses and newborns isn’t military strategy. It’s annihilation,” the group said.
Inside Israeli prisons, Palestinian women face sexual and reproductive violence. Reports describe female detainees being raped or threatened with rape, subjected to invasive strip searches, genital kicking, breast grabbing, and being denied menstrual hygiene products. Pregnant detainees are denied food and medical care.
Outside prison walls, evidence continues to mount of Israeli soldiers looting Palestinian homes and humiliating women. Hundreds of verified photos and videos show soldiers flaunting and wearing women’s underwear, desecrating personal belongings, and mocking the dead and displaced.
“This violation defiles what is sacred in our culture and faith,” said the report. “It haunts the collective memory of the Palestinian people.”
Euro-Med Monitor, along with UN investigators, says this is not accidental. Gender-based violence in Gaza is being used as a weapon of war; a systematic strategy to break, humiliate, and erase the Palestinian people.
It meets the legal definitions of genocide under the Rome Statute, including acts intended to prevent births and inflict conditions of destruction.
Gaza also now holds the world’s highest rate of child amputees. Between 3,000 and 4,000 children, many of them girls, have lost limbs in Israeli attacks. At least 10 children a day become amputees.
These girls now face lifelong trauma, without proper treatment or prosthetics. Many cannot walk, play, or even sleep without pain.
The report ends with a warning: the world must not ignore the targeted destruction of women and girls in Gaza. Their erasure is not collateral damage. It is a central feature of what human rights groups are calling a gendered genocide.
17 July 2025
Source: countercurrents.org