Ohood Nassar & Nesma al-Harazeen
The Electronic Intifada / September 7, 2026
A worn-out tent in al-Saraya camp in Gaza City is all that is left Fatima Abu al-Kas (28), originally from Shujaiya, and her three children, the oldest of which is just 10.
Their tent was donated by her late husband’s brother.
Abu al-Kas told The Electronic Intifada that her husband, Ahmad, was killed by Israeli tank fire in March 2024 while trying to collect flour from the al-Nabulsi area.
In order to survive, Abu al-Kas started a small homemade sweets business in early 2025. She earned about $14 a day, she said, an income that was nowhere near enough to meet her family’s needs.
“The space was tiny, the work took all my time, and I had to endure the heat of the sun,” she said. “The price of everything – from cooking fuel to sugar – were extremely high, but I had no choice if I wanted to provide for my children.”
She had no capital to start the business, but a donor unknown to her supplied her with an oven and baking trays while she was displaced in Tal al-Hawa, a neighbourhood of Gaza City.
In September 2025, she was displaced again, this time to southern Gaza. The only belongings she managed to take, she said, were a single change of clothes for each of her children. When she returned to Gaza City following the ceasefire announcement in October 2025, she found that her former tent, oven and all of her baking equipment had been destroyed in a bombardment.
Abu al-Kas said she hopes someone will provide her with a new oven and baking trays so she can restart her sweets business.
Since losing her equipment, she said, she cannot even afford her children’s most basic school supplies.
“My children cry every day before they leave for school because they don’t have a notebook.”
Widows struggling
Abu al-Kas’ story is far from unique.
According to Aziza al-Kahlout, media spokesperson for Gaza’s social affairs sector, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has left just over 22,000 women widowed. The total number of households in Gaza headed by women now comprise 18 percent of the total, compared to 12 percent prior to October 2023.
“These women urgently need assistance,” Al-Kahlout told The Electronic Intifada. “Many widows are struggling to secure even the most basic necessities for their families, including food, clothing and healthcare.”
Aya Hillis (28) sat with her two children, Amir, 3, and Alma, 18 months, inside a building located in Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood that she described as “a pile of stacked stones.”
The “living room” – the small apartment is divided by tarpaulins into a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and a living space – had no furniture besides two chairs and a plastic table. Some mattresses were strewn on the floor.
She said the structure was infested with rats and mosquitoes. To protect her children and keep out rodents, she has also covered holes in the wall with tarpaulins.
Despite the state of the building, she pays a steep rent of $340 a month.
“If I wanted to rent a better place,” she said when interviewed in mid-July, “I’d have to pay more.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has forced thousands of mothers in Gaza to abandon their former roles as homemakers after losing their husbands and become breadwinners under extremely difficult circumstances.
Hillis told The Electronic Intifada that her husband, Deeb Zuhair (35) died in June 2025 from blood cancer.
About 50 days before his death, she said, he began suffering from dizziness and physical weakness. At first, Hillis believed he was simply suffering from malnutrition since Israel had blocked food from entering Gaza, and famine began to hit.
He went to the Palestine Red Crescent Hospital in Gaza, where doctors discovered that his haemoglobin level had dropped to as low as 5.
A normal level would be between 13.5 and 17.5 and such low haemoglobin levels – which leads to anaemia – can often be caused by malnutrition or underlying chronic disease.
“We were shocked,” she said. “He always had high blood levels and used to donate blood regularly.”
Further tests revealed that Zuhair had blood cancer. Doctors told the family that he urgently needed treatment outside Gaza. Hillis completed all the paperwork required for a medical referral. They were simply waiting for approval to travel.
“I truly believed he would leave for treatment and recover,” she says. “I packed two bags – one for me and one for him.”
But Israel kept the crossing at Rafah closed and did not allow any exit from Gaza. Deeb died at Al-Helou International Hospital while awaiting permission to seek treatment abroad.
Hillis now survives on support from her own family, her late husband’s relatives and occasional cash assistance programs. She hopes to find a job so she can support her children herself, but she said – beyond there being very little work – her youngest is only 18 months and still needs constant care.
Since Zuhair’s death, she said, every task, whether finding food and fetching water to fixing what can be fixed and keeping the family safe, has become an enormous burden.
The street vendor
On our way back from Al-Saraya Camp, at around 1:30 pm, we met Um Muhammad (44) walking along Al-Saraya Street.
She did not want to give her full name for this interview.
A thick string hung around her neck, supporting a cardboard box filled with small pieces of candy that she sold as she walked. She wore a worn-out cap that was torn in the middle in a futile attempt to shield herself from the blazing sun.
She looked exhausted and explained that she had been displaced to Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The previous day, she had walked from Deir al-Balah to Gaza City – a journey of nearly six hours – in order to sell her sweets. When she finally reached Al-Nabulsi, a driver recognized her from earlier in the day.
“He asked why I was still walking,” she recalled. “I told him I couldn’t afford the transportation fare. He offered to drive me to Gaza City. And he did.”
Um Muhammad told The Electronic Intifada that her 22-year-old son, Muhammad, was killed in November 2024 when he went to buy cigarettes and got caught out in a bombardment.
Her husband’s overwhelming grief caused him to suffer a stroke that left him blind while she lost both her hearing and her ability to speak after her son’s death.
Three days later, a neighbouring house was bombed. The shock restored her hearing and speech, but she sustained an injury to her left foot so serious. Doctors told her that her leg needed to be amputated.
However, when she was taken into surgery, her heart rate rose dangerously, forcing doctors to postpone the operation.
She never underwent the amputation.
“I became the sole provider for my family,” she said, a family that, in addition to her now blind husband, also comprises four children. “I couldn’t afford to lose the ability to work.”
At the end of 2024, she started a small mobile street stall selling sweets.
The business cost around $25 to set up, money that came from assistance provided by a passerby, a stranger to her.
Today, she earns roughly $5 a day. “Of course it isn’t,” she said, when asked if this was enough. “But I try to make it enough.”
Al-Kahlout said working women in Gaza – particularly those relying on informal jobs such as street vending – face numerous social and economic challenges, foremost among them unstable incomes that depend entirely on daily sales.
Although some widows receive modest financial aid from charitable and humanitarian organizations, many receive nothing at all, al-Kahlout said. And even for those who do, the assistance is nowhere near enough to cover the rising cost of living.
This, she added, is not going to change until there is more financial support coming into Gaza, whether for widows directly – so they can meet their families’ basic needs – to fund small income-generating projects or to expand psychological and social support services for families to help them cope with the loss of a provider.
Ohood Nassar is a journalist and teacher from Gaza
Nesma al-Harazeen is a writer from Gaza
