How aid Cuts Disproportionately Impact Women and why Israel’s Decision to ban UNRWA Will Have an ‘Unequally Cruel Impact on the Most Vulnerable’

As Brits pick apart Labour’s inaugural budget, the world has witnessed a far more painful welfare slash: Israel’s brutal blow to Palestine’s already feeble aid provision.

On Monday, the Knesset passed two bills to ban UNRWA, Gaza’s largest provider of humanitarian support and the core infrastructure upon which almost all regional operators depend.

There is another story from the week we want to draw your attention to – see if you can connect the dots.

Last Thursday, the UN Security Council held its annual debate on ‘women, peace and security’, where they grimly observed that the proportion of women killed in armed conflicts doubled globally in a year.

Cases of conflict-related sexual violence increased by half. Despite (or rather, in keeping with) this, the proportion of aid targeted at ‘gender-specific services’ – such as reproductive health or gender-based violence – fell.

When aid is cut, women’s services are the first to go. This might seem fair: why help half a population when you can help all? When push comes to shove, surely universal services like food and shelter should get priority? And indeed, they do. But something is missed by this logic. When disaster strikes, women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men.

Crisis are not gender-blind: 90% of those killed during Bangladesh’s 1991 cyclone were women, as were 70% of casualties from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

In war, innocent men are often served up as cannon fodder; but among those left to live in its shadow, patriarchy prevails. Not everyone starts with an equal level of need, and under extreme pressure, inequality thrives. As aid to Palestine is severed at the root, we must examine what additional cost women will pay for the continuing carnage of accused male war criminals.

Who better to answer this question, than women leading aid solutions in their own embattled communities of Yemen, Pakistan and one of the world’s biggest refugee camps, Kenya’s Kakuma? Their eye-witness testimonies help to explain the strangely sexist casualties coming from crises.

The first glaring oversight is reproductive healthcare. Waood Afara was pregnant when Houthi forces stormed Yemen’s capital in 2015 and plunged her country into war.

A doctor herself, she thanks Allah that her unborn child survived an air raid that blasted her from three floors up into rubble. She now works as a reproductive health officer for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Aden City, because “if we are not helping [ourselves], who will?”

When the UK reduced its international aid commitment from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5% in 2022, a leaked Government report warned this would lead to the deaths of thousands of pregnant women in Africa, as gender-specific programs would get the first axing. But reproduction is not ‘gender-specific’.

“When we take care of pregnant women, we save the backbone of the family,” said Dr Afara. “I have seen first-hand the impact of this. I have seen children who have been able to go to school and get education. I have seen communities that have been able to recover from conflict.”

The second reality overlooked by gender-blind aid, is that sexual violence and child forced marriage increase during crises. In my own investigation for Byline Times during the 2021 Taliban offensive in Afghanistan, I spoke to 15-year-old Attiye, who had fled and was in hiding after her impoverished family sold her to an elderly supporter of the incoming government: “I’m too scared to breathe,” she had wept. “If my brothers find me, they will behead me.”

“Since families are under huge financial burden, it’s easier for them to marry off the young girls,” explained Shabnam Baloch, the IRC’s country director in Pakistan: “One less mouth to feed”.

Baloch coordinated aid in 2022 after catastrophic flooding in Pakistan “turned villages into lakes”, and she witnessed an “appalling” rise in gender-based violence. “Since men are under tremendous trauma, it is easier for them to take out their frustration on the women,” she said. Meanwhile, “when women are confined, it is very easy to exploit them.”

The aid sector often fails to acknowledge this: “Gender-based violence is not seen as immediate life-saving assistance,” Baloch said. She has a theory as to why. When she joined the development sector two decades ago, she was “only one woman in a room of a hundred men”. Despite notable progress, she reports that “most of the decision makers are still men”.

“They talk to the government in Pakistan, and together they decide where to invest,” she went on.

Unequal decision-making is itself a reason why more women die in disasters than men: they often have less say in critical calls such as where to flee to or how to divide resources. Women also suffer unequal access globally to everything from education to swimming lessons to bank accounts – all crucial survival mechanisms.

Where famine prevails, this can have disturbing results. Dr Sila Monthe oversees one hospital, one health centre, and five dispensaries in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, and they are all-too crammed with malnutritioned and starving women. Why?

Sometimes, when I read wartime headlines grouping ‘women and children’ together, and separately listing their deaths as if somehow more tragic than men’s, it feels to me at once infantilising of women and uncaring of men. But failing to acknowledge the intersectional impact of crises, as aid cuts tend to, is worse.

“Women and girls have been systematically persecuted, segregated and harassed,” said Nazanin Boniadi, Iranian-British actress and activist. “They’re not more vulnerable because of who they are, they are more vulnerable because of what the state has done to them”.

Boniadi’s mother was on the frontlines of Iranian protests while she was in the womb, and since the killing of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 by Iran’s so-called morality police, Boniadi has taken up the mantle, blazoning ‘Woman. Life. Freedom’ across news programmes and in parliaments around the world. Every woman featured in this article represents the ‘vulnerable’ steering their own salvations.

In under 90 days, UNRWA will be unable to legally operate in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which headquarters not just its aid deliveries, but hospitals, schools, healthcare clinics, microfinance programmes and development projects serving some 5.9 million Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Dubbed “a new way to kill children” by the head of UNICEF, Israel’s decision will have an unequally cruel impact on the most vulnerable.

Their stories must be sought out, or else they will be buried. And all the questions that come from them must be answered.

Media Storms’ episode, ‘Women in Crisis’, is available wherever you get your podcasts.