When Raneen went into labour in Gaza, she desperately called for an ambulance but the dispatcher told her the service only responded to injured people. A neighbour found a horse-drawn cart, which moved slowly through Khan Younis, in the south of the besieged enclave, with Raneen having little space to breathe between contractions.
Her daughter was born into a war that had already taken her son and left her husband too sick to work. She had spent the pregnancy malnourished, anaemic and short of vitamins. She tells The Independent: “Our suffering is immense. My daughter was born amid this tragedy.”
Months later, she found Wefaq, a women-led organisation in Gaza, through word of mouth. They gave her a mattress and access to a psychotherapist. Raneen is one of 50,000 people supported this year by Wefaq, which provides legal aid, psychosocial care, a gender-based violence hotline and humanitarian assistance – more than double the number it reached before the war.
The war inside Gaza was trigged by a bloody attack inside Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed and 250 more taken hostage. Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Strip.
Two years into a five-year programme supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worth roughly $1m (£734,000) a year, Washington cut the funding entirely in early 2025, according to Wefaq. That came as part of Donald Trump’s dismantling of the agency when he returned to the White House for his second presidential term.
Buthaina Subeh, Wefaq’s director, says: “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.
That need 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 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”.
Into that vacuum, Randa, a lawyer working with Wefaq through ActionAid, says violence has moved. After the judicial headquarters were destroyed in airstrikes, the courts were suspended entirely, leaving women with no recourse to access their rights. She says: “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 haven’t received child support in over a year, who cannot enforce custody arrangements that predate the start of the war. There are now believed to be at least 22,000 widows in Gaza and women’s unemployment stands at more than 90 per cent.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights 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.
Nisreen, one of Wefaq’s psychotherapists, runs sessions from a tent with a two-month-old baby. She describes women arriving unable to concentrate because of malnutrition, some fainting in the room. She says: “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 adds: “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. Nisreen says: “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.”
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
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