In Gaza, the sky has fallen in ways no one should have to survive. Over 60,000 Palestinians many of them women and children, have been killed since October 2023. Entire neighbourhoods lie in ruins. Hospitals, schools, and shelters have become targets. And through it all, Palestinian women persist, resist, grieve, and care.
The Politics of Care in a Time of War
Women in Gaza are giving birth in rubble. They are feeding children through siege and starvation. They are burying loved ones and finding the strength to carry the living. In war zones, gendered labour doesn’t disappear, it becomes heavier. Palestinian women are carrying this unbearable weight on their shoulders.
At the same time, Palestinian feminists have long resisted both occupation and patriarchal violence. They are not only victims, they are leaders, organisers, educators, healers. From the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees to grassroots mutual aid groups, women have always been central to the struggle for liberation.
Decolonial Feminism Means Standing with Gaza
Mainstream Western feminism has too often ignored or sidelined Palestinian voices, treating their suffering as inconvenient or politically risky. This silence is complicity.
Decolonising feminism demands more. It asks us to confront imperialism, militarism, and capitalism, systems that profit from war and call it peace. It asks us to see the connections between settler colonialism in Palestine and Indigenous struggles around the world. It asks us not to look away.
This is not about being “neutral.” This is about being human.
Grief Is Political
When we mourn, we must also rage. Against the arms dealers. Against the governments enabling genocide. Against the media narratives that erase Palestinian lives. But our rage must also feed action: calls to ceasefire, to end occupation, to dismantle the structures that allow this horror to happen again and again.
We can sign petitions, pressure elected officials, boycott arms manufacturers and complicit corporations, and donate to on-the-ground humanitarian relief. But more than that, we must amplify Palestinian voices, in our organising, our communities, and our movements.
We Reclaim the Raven for Palestine
As feminists, as people of conscience, we say: Gaza matters. Palestinian lives matter. Feminism that does not recognise this is not liberation, it is branding.
We reclaim our feminism from the dead language of “both sides.” We root it in justice, in grief, in rage, in care.
And we say, again and again: from the river to the sea, all people deserve to be free.
