When S.Y. returned to where her home once stood, she could not find a single wall to recognize it by. The street had caved into dust and gray cement. What caught her attention first was the silence, no voices, nothing moving around. Smoke and dust from broken concrete filled the air. Homes had fallen into each other, as if the neighborhood had collapsed inward.
She began searching for something familiar, any trace that this had once been her home: a doorway, a wall, a piece of furniture. There was nothing intact, only fragments buried under rubble.
“When I went back, my house was finished,” she said. “I lost my husband, I lost my kids, I lost my house. I came back and there was nothing. Not even the walls. And I was not even left with the slightest personal belonging or a government document to prove my rights.”
More than 16,000 women in Gaza have lost their husbands since October 2023, leaving 1 in 7 families now led by a woman. On December 4, 2023, the Israeli army released a video showing the demolition of Gaza’s main courthouse, one of several judicial institutions destroyed across the territory as part of Israel’s broader campaign of targeting judicial and law enforcement institutions and personnel, with the objective of facilitating social collapse.
For women like S.Y., the consequences of this social collapse has stripped her of any means of asserting her rights through legal recourse, given the decimation of the legal system’s ability to adjudicate family affairs. The legal vacuum has left hundreds of thousands of women unable to claim inheritance, formalize a divorce, retain custody of their children, or obtain documented protections under Palestinian personal status law. For these women, the killing was not the end of what Israel took from them.
‘There is nothing I can do to get my rights’
S.Y., 33, agreed to speak to Mondoweiss on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from relatives. She comes from east of al-Bureij refugee camp but is currently sheltering in her sister’s home in al-Nuseirat. Before the war, she described her life with her children as “ideal, happy, full.” Her daughter was the one she felt closest to.
She speaks quietly, choosing her words carefully. “My daughter was like my best friend,” she said. “Her name was Malak, which means ‘angel’ in English. And she really was an angel.”
Malak lost both of her sisters, who were killed along with their father when Israel bombed their family home. S.Y. had left the house to buy oil and flour, and so had managed to survive.
Israel’s bombing destroyed civil registries alongside courthouses, and S.Y.’s home falls beyond the so-called “Yellow Line,” which cuts Gaza roughly in half. Her house lies in the zone currently controlled by the Israeli army, which has been so thoroughly destroyed that even the land has been rendered legally and practically worthless. She cannot find a photograph, a marriage certificate, or a property deed. She communicates by phone with her husband’s nephew about inheritance, but there is nothing left to inherit, and no court to adjudicate it, even if there were.
“My suffering did not stop with the loss,” she said. “No organization reached out to offer support. In our conservative society, a widow or a divorced woman becomes a heavy burden. You don’t receive psychological support or financial help. You only receive silence, or worse.”
She said that she attempted to resolve issues related to her inheritance with her husband’s family, but that they began to pressure her to sign away her rights, based on the fact that a woman with no legal options and no courts has no leverage.
“I tried to reach a legal settlement with my husband’s family over inheritance,” she said. “But there is no legal body to turn to in the complete absence of law. There is nothing I can do to get my rights. Only an unknown waiting period. Women are oppressed, and their rights are completely lost.”
S.Y. said she lives in a daily state of anxiety, constantly worrying about the future in the absence of any legal recourse. “Nobody can give me justice,” she says.
The courts Israel destroyed
Before October 2023, Gaza’s family law system consisted of religious Shari’a courts and civilian courts of first instance in Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Khan Younis. Palestinian women depended upon these institutions to enforce their rights to inheritance, divorce, custody, and alimony. On October 9, 2023, Israeli forces bombed the Palestine Bar Association headquarters in Gaza, destroying its official archives. UN human rights experts condemned what they called the “unnecessary destruction of the judicial infrastructure in Gaza.”
At a UN human rights hearing in early 2026, a representative of Palestinian women’s organizations confirmed that courts were destroyed even as organizations continued working, and that the resulting judicial vacuum has pushed dispute resolution into displacement camps and makeshift mediation sessions. Amal Syam, director of the Women Affairs Centre, says that these mediation efforts now take place “even under the rubble.”
Wael Abuassi, an attorney specializing in family law in Gaza, now works under severely limited conditions, relying on phone calls and informal meetings rather than formal courtrooms. Like many legal professionals in Gaza, he operates without a functioning office or judicial system, trying to mediate cases in a landscape where enforcement mechanisms have collapsed.
“The problem is the absence of executive authority,” Abuassi said. “Without a functioning system that can enforce court decisions, any ruling just becomes ink on paper.”
S.Y. says she still waits, unsure what justice could look like in a place where even proof of her life has been erased.
“I hope conditions improve,” she said. “Maybe one day I will be able to claim my rights through the courts, if safety and stability return to Gaza. But after what Israel brought here, what they destroyed. I really do not know if any of it comes back. I do not know if I will come back.”
Divorce and displacement
D.S., 28, a pseudonym, was only two months into her marriage when Israel’s bombardment began, and military orders forced her and her husband south on foot along roads where the dead had not yet been collected. Her home was completely destroyed, along with her husband’s makeup store in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
When she speaks, D.S. is sitting inside a crowded tent, where the thin fabric walls let in heat, noise, and the voices of neighboring families. Her daughter Sara stays close to her, moving between her lap and the ground. There is no privacy; every word is spoken within earshot of others. The tent traps heat in summer and leaks in the winter. Neighboring families are close enough to hear every argument, every crying child, every prayer said in the night.
“We walked on foot,” she said. “We were seeing dead bodies. We were hungry, thirsty, surrounded by scenes of death. Living in a tent is a nightmare for me.”
She told Mondoweiss that in the first days, they slept on the ground in conditions “lacking the most basic necessities of life.”
“A woman like me had to wear hijab 24/7, as we share the tent with many families,” she explained.
They ended up in Maghazi refugee camp, one of hundreds of thousands crammed into Gaza’s south. Nearly 250,000 women and girls were living in catastrophic conditions marked by extreme food scarcity. D.S.’s daughter, Sara, had not yet turned two.
Life in the camp followed the same grinding rhythm every day. “We would wake up very early; most people in the displacement camp wake up at six in the morning, and everything becomes noise, no one can sleep,” she said. “I would prepare some sandwiches for breakfast with whatever food was available, and begin the daily journey of hardship: washing clothes, collecting wood to set a fire, getting drinking water, filling a small tank for bathroom use.”
Each day, her husband left to search for work or money in an economy that Israel had destroyed. Israel’s blockade of goods and cash had driven prices beyond reach. He returned empty-handed, and the weight of it broke whatever was left between them.
“The difficulty of life accumulated the disagreements,” she said. “Shouting became daily, over the most trivial reasons. I suffered physical assault, until continuing our married life became impossible.”
Her husband eventually issued a divorce in absentia — no lawyers, no court, no legal procedure. Under Palestinian personal status law, D.S. was entitled to alimony, housing rights, and documented protections for her daughter, Sara. She received none.
“Alimony did not reach me, even though the law obliges the husband to pay it and considers it a fundamental right,” she said. “But there was no legal means to force him to do so. It just happened, and I had to accept it.”
Sara will turn two soon. She has no legal protections, no documented rights, and no court that currently exists to establish either.
“Reality has guaranteed her no rights whatsoever,” D.S. said. “My daughter deserves better than what this war has left for her. I wish women’s organizations could take action and provide legal support to divorced women.”
Denied to see her children
Maysoun, 32, a pseudonym used for her safety, spent nearly two years unable to return home after her husband kicked her out. She used to live in Shati’ refugee camp but is now displaced in Deir al-Balah in a tent, thin fabric stretched over uneven ground, offering little protection from heat, cold, or time. It is not a place that belongs to her, only a place where she waits. Around her, families come and go, structures shift, and nothing feels stable or permanent, mirroring the legal limbo she lives in.
Her husband refused to let her see their children. He refused to officially divorce her, leaving her legally suspended: still a wife under the law, with none of the protections that status is supposed to carry.
“I feel like I am stuck,” she told Mondoweiss. “My family tried to solve the matter and convince him to officially divorce me, but it was pointless.”
Her children are Basem and Bayan. Basem is five, Bayan three. For nearly two years, Maysoun did not see them.
“Every occasion, every Eid, every date opens the wounds of memory,” she said. “I remember, and I feel pain with every detail.”
“How I wished I could celebrate my children’s birthdays together with them,” she said. “I remember the last birthday before the war, how happy I was. I had prepared their favorite chocolate cake.”
That last birthday was before October 2023. Basem and Bayan have had several birthdays since, but Maysoun was not there for any of them. Her only contact with them occasionally came through her ex-husband’s sister, usually a brief phone call at someone else’s discretion. She had no legal means to demand more.
Family mediation, the informal system that had always existed alongside formal courts, became the only system left, but the answer it delivered her was unequivocal: she would remain suspended — no divorce, no rights, no access to her children.
After the ceasefire began in October 2025, she tried again through whatever legal channels had partially reopened, but enforcement remained almost nonexistent. Her husband’s terms were final: she would give up everything including alimony, property, custody of Basem and Bayan, just in exchange for the divorce he had been withholding.
“In the end, I was forced to relinquish all my rights in exchange for the divorce,” she said. “Everything, in exchange for being free from a man who had already left. That is the reality of women in Gaza. We are abandoned.”
