A woman gave birth in a horse-drawn cart in Khan Younis after ambulance dispatchers told her they only responded to injured people, not women in labour. Raneen, who had already lost a son and whose husband was too sick to work, spent the pregnancy malnourished, anaemic and deficient in vitamins. Her daughter was born into a war that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Strip – a conflict triggered by the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 that killed around 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostages. “Our suffering is immense,” Raneen told a reporter. “My daughter was born amid this tragedy.”
Months later, she found Wefaq, a women-led organisation in Gaza, through word of mouth. The group gave her a mattress and access to a psychotherapist. Raneen is one of 50,000 people Wefaq has supported this year – more than double the number it reached before the war.
‘Suddenly, everything stopped’: Wefaq after the USAID cuts
Wefaq provides legal aid, psychosocial care, a gender-based violence hotline and humanitarian assistance. It was two years into a five-year programme supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worth roughly $1m (£734,000) a year, when Washington cut the funding entirely in early 2025. The cut came as part of Donald Trump’s dismantling of the agency during his second presidential term. In January 2025 Trump ordered a near-total freeze on foreign aid, placing most employees on administrative leave. By March 2025, 83% of USAID programmes had been cancelled, affecting approximately 5,200 contracts. As of 1 July 2025, USAID’s operations ceased, with U.S. foreign assistance now administered by the State Department.
Buthaina Subeh, Wefaq’s director, said: “Suddenly, everything stopped. It was a very difficult period. If that project had continued, the scale and quality of services would have been very different.” The US State Department has been contacted for comment on the cuts. Wefaq found other funders and kept going, but at reduced capacity, absorbing a surge in need with a fraction of its former resources. The impact of the wider USAID cuts has been felt across the region. MEPPA programmes, which included $250m for Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding projects, were cancelled. Feminist collectives in Gaza report the closure of shelters and trauma centres critical for survivors of gender-based violence.
Without courts, women left defenceless
The need for Wefaq’s services continues to balloon because the institutions women would normally turn to are also gone. Gaza’s Sharia courts held exclusive jurisdiction over divorce, custody, inheritance and guardianship. A 2025 report by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented the near-total collapse of the system: courts and archives destroyed, thousands of legal case files lost, judges and staff killed or displaced. At a UN human rights hearing in March this year, a representative of Palestinian women’s organisations said dispute resolution had been pushed into displacement camps and makeshift mediation sessions “even under the rubble”. The PCHR alleges that the targeting of Sharia courts forms part of a systematic Israeli policy to dismantle Palestinian institutional and legal structures. Israel has repeatedly denied this, and says it does not target civilians or civilian infrastructure.
Randa, a lawyer working with Wefaq through ActionAid, said violence has moved into this vacuum. “After the judicial headquarters were destroyed in airstrikes, the courts were suspended entirely, leaving women with no recourse to access their rights,” she said. “This war has helped men evade giving women their rights, because of the absence of police and courts. So many men have stopped granting rights to women, such as expenses or child support.” She takes calls from women who need divorces, who have not received child support in over a year, who cannot enforce custody arrangements that predate the war.
The collapse of the legal system has coincided with a dramatic shift in household structures. There are now believed to be at least 22,000 widows in Gaza. One in seven families is now headed by a woman, up from 12% before the conflict to around 18% during the war. Women’s unemployment stands at more than 90% – 92% in 2025, compared with 81% for men – while labour force participation for women in Gaza is just 17%. The informal economy has expanded, placing women in the role of providers without access to sustainable means of production.
Nisreen, one of Wefaq’s psychotherapists, runs sessions from a tent with a two-month-old baby. She described women arriving unable to concentrate because of malnutrition, some fainting in the room. “Many showed clear signs of trauma, many carried deep feelings of guilt – thinking that if they had kept their children at home, or stopped their husbands from going out, they would still be alive,” she said. “The hardest part of our work is that so often we are both the client and the service provider at the same time.”
Women’s rights organisations globally receive less than one per cent of humanitarian and gender-focused aid funding, according to UN Women – despite being local, already embedded and operational when international organisations are still establishing logistics. The USAID money that reached Wefaq worked, keeping lawyers employed and services running for women who had nowhere else to go. With those cuts, the space for survival has shrunk further. Nisreen said: “I now live in a tent that is neither safe nor able to provide security or protection. These are all things we have now lost.”
