Long Live the Palestinian Women’s Resistance

Three years after the Al-Aqsa Flood, the International Women’s Alliance (IWA) stands firmly with the Palestinian people and women who continue to lead, organize, nurture, resist, and struggle for the liberation of their land and people.

For three years the Zionist state, backed by US imperialism and its allies, has escalated their genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. More than 74,000 Palestinians have been reported killed, including over 20,179 children (44,143 injured) and 12,500 women. Hundreds of thousands more have been injured, displaced, and deprived of the basic conditions necessary for survival.

Behind every statistic is a family, a community, and a future that occupation and war have sought to destroy. Women in Gaza have endured the loss of their children, partners, parents, homes, livelihoods, schools, hospitals, and entire communities. But the Palestinian people remain steadfast. Life has not stopped, and women continue to give birth, care for their families, educate children, provide medical care, organize communities, document atrocities, preserve culture, and rebuild life amid the rubble of their homes. Their labor is essential to the survival of Palestinian society and has carried the Palestinian cause forward for generations.

The Palestinian Feminist Collective's Report - 'A Predatory State' further exposes the gendered dimensions of the system of zionist colonization and domination. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, the report documents how sexualized and gendered violence has been used as a mechanism of settler-colonial rule since before the Nakba of 1948 until today. The report also shows that gendered and sexualized violence has only intensified and escalated since the escalated genocide in October 2023. By seeing the parallels of history until today we know that this violence is part of a broader architecture in which Palestinian bodies, families, reproductive lives, homes, and movement are subjected to control, domination and violence.

The report also challenges narrow understandings of gendered violence. Sexualized violence has been inflicted on Palestinians of all ages and genders, including attacks targeting men's sexual and reproductive organs, alongside sexual humiliation, torture, rape, coercion, and blackmail. Understanding this violence as gendered does not mean reducing Palestinian women to victims; rather, it reveals how the occupation seeks to control Palestinian life itself—its reproduction, its families, its communities, and its capacity to resist.

There can be no liberation of women under a system that denies an entire people their freedom, land, bodily autonomy, and right to determine their future. And there can be no genuine change for women that invokes women's rights while ignoring the colonial structures that produce violence against Palestinian women, men, and children.

The testimonies heard by the International People’s Tribunal for Palestine, held in Barcelona in November 2025, gave further voice to this reality. Palestinian witnesses and experts testified about the destruction of homes, farms, water sources, food systems, the environment, and the very conditions necessary for Palestinian life. The Tribunal heard evidence concerning the effects of the war on women, as well as testimony from farmers and workers about the destruction of the means of sustaining Palestinian communities. Its jury subsequently found Israel and the United States guilty of genocide, ecocide, and forced starvation.

The destruction of education is also an attack on the future of Palestinian children and on the continuity of Palestinian society. Dr. Iyad Al-Karnaz, Coordinator of the Disability Working Group in the Gaza Strip and Director of the Stars of Hope Association has conducted extensive research on the impacts of the occupation on Palestinian school aged children. He found that 98% of Gaza's school buildings have been damaged or destroyed, while around 700,000 children have gone almost three consecutive school years without formal in-person education. Schools have been reduced to rubble, classrooms have become shelters, teachers and students have been killed, and the basic conditions necessary for learning have been devastated. Prior to the October 7 attacks, 95% of school aged children were enrolled in Gaza, and now the formal education infrastracture has been almost completely obliterated.

Every child has the right to education. Every Palestinian child has the right to learn, to develop their abilities, to know their history, and to imagine and build a future. For three years, occupation and war have denied Palestinian children that right. Yet Palestinian families, teachers, and children continue to create spaces for learning amid devastation. Their determination to learn is itself an act of resistance—a refusal to allow the destruction of schools to become the destruction of Palestinian knowledge, memory, and identity.

For Palestinian women, defending education is part of defending the life of the community. Mothers, teachers, health workers, and organizers continue to carry knowledge and culture from one generation to the next. To educate Palestinian children is to affirm that there will be a Palestinian future.

Palestinian women have never been passive victims of occupation. From generations of struggle against colonialism and dispossession to the present, women have organized in their communities, resisted displacement, confronted imprisonment and military violence, defended their land, and carried Palestinian history and identity across generations. Today, they continue to raise children who know the names of their villages, the stories of their ancestors, and their right to return.

The occupation seeks to uproot Palestinians from their land and to destroy the social bonds that sustain their people. It seeks to make Palestinian life impossible. But Palestinian women continue to affirm, through their everyday survival and collective resistance, that Palestinian life cannot be erased. Palestinian identity cannot be erased. Palestine cannot be eradicated.

International solidarity for the people and women of Palestine plays a vital role, but solidarity must strengthen the Palestinian people's own struggle for self-determination. The Palestinian people have made clear through generations of resistance that they will determine their own future, their own society, and the future of their land.

On this third anniversary of Al-Aqsa Flood, we honor the Palestinian women who have refused to surrender: the mothers raising another generation, the health workers saving lives, the teachers keeping education alive, the organizers sustaining communities, the prisoners resisting behind bars, the farmers defending their land, the youth and students preserving knowledge, and all those who continue to struggle despite unimaginable loss.

We in the International Women's Alliance offer our highest salute to all martyrs, both Palestinian and those in support of the Palestinian people's struggle, who have sacrificed their lives in the name of freedom, justice and the Palestinian people's right to resist. IWA calls on women and oppressed peoples everywhere to strengthen international solidarity with Palestine, expose the systems of occupation, patriarchy, and imperialism that sustain Palestinian dispossession, demand accountability for crimes committed against the Palestinian people, and support the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, return, and liberation.

The Tribunal has recorded the testimony. The evidence has been documented. The Palestinians continue to forge ahead in their fight. Let the Palestinian people's relentless struggle for freedom serve as a beacon of hope for all people fighting back against the boot of imperialist domination.

Palestinian women are not victims—they are fighters, organizers, teachers, mothers, and leaders of liberation. Every Palestinian child has the right to learn and the right to a bright future ahead, in their own liberated land.

Long live Palestinian women's resistance!

Long live the Palestinian people's struggle for liberation and self-determination!

End the occupation and the siege!

End imperialist support for Israel!