Women and War: Fighting for survival, for dignity

The war in Gaza has been in full swing for four months now, killing, starving, mutilating, and displacing a staggering amount of its inhabitants. It is Rola Abou Hashem, a Palestinian journalist living under Israeli bombardment day and night, who tells us of the suffering inside Gaza, through her dispatches that are meant to shake this world’s conscience.

A mother, a wife, and a journalist, she describes the multifaceted role that women play in situations of war.

Because even though war is communicated as an exclusively male domain, women are, contrary to dominant opinion, not only its passive victims. They are involved on multiple levels. They continue to work, going into conflict zones to do their jobs as reporters.

Have they not previously gone so far as to take up arms in Algeria during the War of Independence, and in Palestine in the 1970s under Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)?

And amid the total chaos in Gaza, during this livestreamed genocide, 180 women continue to give birth every day—on the rubble, in the most macabre of settings. Is the fertility of Palestinian women, one of the highest in the world, not also an embodiment of the resistance against Israeli occupation? Against its intention to annihilate an entire people?

This dossier, encompassing the words, reports, and articles of Mediterranean feminist journalists who live either on the front lines of armed conflict or nearby, intends to give a face, a name, and flesh to all the women who fight to maintain their dignity in situations of extreme violence.

Illustration by Jana Traboulsi*

*Jana Traboulsi generously offered us the use of some of her poignant illustrations posted on her Instagram account. We graciously thank her. Jana Traboulsi is a talented Lebanese illustrator and graphic designer. She teaches at the American University of Beirut and also works independently with organizations and institutions in the social and cultural sector.